Overseers Oversight

THE BOARD of Overseers election is heating up again. Alumni Against Apartheid (AAA) is running a full slate of candidates and the Alumni Association is putting up some of its most interesting nominees in years. It promises to be a lively campaign.

Last year I ran for the Board with Kenneth Simmons '54 and Gay Seidman '78 on a platform of full divestment. After almost a year, I am still amazed by the vehemance with which the administration opposed us.

What caused its nearly hysterical reaction? Was the administration so committed to its South African investments that it had to defend them at all costs? Or was the administration frightened by a handful of Berkeley rowdies?

The true reason, I suspect, was fear of the Board of Overseers itself. For 100 years the Board has been a polite, compliant group, quietly rubber-stamping the administration's decisions. President Eliot--no slouch when it came to gathering power for the administration--said that the Board should maintain an attitude of suspicious vigilance toward the Corporation. But this vigilance was relaxed and relaxed, and the Board went to sleep.

One reads in The Crimson and elsewhere that ultimate power in the University rests with the Corporation, which is self-perpetutating. But this is not true. The Charter places final authority for all University affairs, except routine daily business, in the Board of Overseers. The Corporation acts for the University, but is "always responsible" to the Board. The orthography is quaint, but the meaning is clear.

THE THREAT to the administration is not that the Board will take this or that position on a particular issues, however important that issue may be. Rather, it is that the Board will take any position on any issue, and use its power to enforce it. The administration fears that the overseers will wake up and do what they are supposed to do: oversee.

And that, it seems to me, is the best reason for AAA to continue its electoral struggle. The Board of Overseers ought to wake up because it is the only institution in the University that makes a pretense of democracy.

I would go further. I think the Board itself should be more democratic. To begin with, it is a disgrace to a university whose motto is "veritas" that the Board's meetings and actions should be secret. What do they discuss in those meetings? Secret weapons? Troop movements? What? To judge by the minutes of long ago--opened by the University Archives after a discreet 50 years--the meetings are excruciatingly boring. Maybe that is the secret.

If the rationale of secrecy is that it promotes free and open discussion, let me suggest that the best way to have free and open discussion is to have free and open meetings. Truth flourishes in sunshine. Nothing flourishes in darkness but folly--and worse.

The overseers are our representatives. We ought to know what they are saying. Let them state their positions openly so they may be subjected to scrutiny and criticism. That is what democracy requires.

John Plotz '69 is a deputy state public defender in San Fransisco who ran for the Board of Overseers last year.