Political Review Editors Resign

About half of the Harvard Political Review's top editors last night decided to quit the quarterly journal rather than accept a new relationship with the Institute of Politics Student Advisory Committee (SAC) that they said would compromise their editorial freedom.

The action by the student-run publication's staff followed a year and a half of negotiations between the Review and the SAC, which sought to increase its control over the Review, said resigning Review Editor-in-Chief David M. Barkan '87.

The SAC in the past has provided more than half of the Review's $2000 annual budget and has been listed as the publisher in the Review's masthead since the magazine's inception in the early 1970s.

Sunday the SAC drafted a final offer to the Review staff advancing a closer relationship between the two organizations. The Review staff was given the choice of accepting the arrangement or resigning, Barkan said.

Nine of 13 editors present at a meeting last night found the proposal unacceptable. As many as 13 editors intend to leave the Review to form a new political journal of their own, Barkan said.

SAC President David C. Michael '87 said last night that the migration of many of the staff members would not prevent his organization from continuing to publish the Review, which includes articles by undergraduates, academic experts, and political figures.

Michael and newly-elected Review Publisher Derek A. West '87 said that it may take some time to pull together the next issue, however. "It's not going to happen overnight," said West.

The new charter that the editors deemed unacceptable states that a publisher elected from the SAC "will be accountable to SAC for the operation of themagazine." Michael said that the publisher's mainfunction would be to oversee the financialoperations of the magazine, which has becomeindebted to SAC three times in the past 10 years.

"It formalizes the underlying relationship thathas always existed" between the two organizations,said Michael.

But Review staff members said they felt thatsuch a move might deny them some of their formereditorial license and that any change in theexecutive board of the Review would serve only toallow the SAC more control over the magazine.

Barkan said the key problems with the final SACproposal were the absence of a "bail-out clause,"whereby the Review editors could opt to leave ifthe new situation were not satisfactory, and thefact that the editor-in-chief's status would bebelow that of the publisher.

"What makes the magazine is commitment. It'snot going to be there if the magazine is not putout by the people doing the work," said Barkan."If they wanted the reponsibility, there are a lotof different ways they could have gone aboutgetting control."

But Michael said that it was necessary that theSAC appoint a publisher to increase communicationwith the Review because in the past, the politicaljournal has fallen into debt and fallen off theirquarterly schedule.

The former Review staff members will hold thefirst meeting of their new political journalSunday. Barkan predicted that the first issue ofthe still untitled publication will come out bythe end of February, when the next issue of theReview was scheduled to be published