Students to Meet With Corporation

A nine-person student delegation--composed of Undergraduate Council members, house committee chairs and other student leaders--will meet with the Harvard Corporation later this month, Council Chair Kenneth E. Lee '89 said in an interview last night.

The April 24 lunch meeting between council representatives and members of Harvard's seven-member governing board will be the third such session in as many years. But it will mark the first time the Corporation has allowed non-council members to accompany elected representatives to the meeting.

Last spring, the Corporation rejected a council request to allow a non-council divestment activist to attend the session.

Lee said this year's slate of representatives--which he selected based on nominations by council members--will represent a variety of interests and student groups.

Council members Lee, Vice Chair Noam Bramson '91, Lucy H. Koh '90, chair of the ad-hoc committee on minority and women faculty hiring, and former-Chair Evan J. Mandery '89 will attend the meeting. The non-council representatives will be David A. Battat '91, and ex-council member and chair of the ad-hoc committee on security, Anthony Romano '90, president of Phillips Brooks House (PBH), and Carlos R. Watson, the Harvard-Radcliffe Black Student Association's representative to the Harvard Foundation, Lee said.

The two house committee chairs will be chosen by Lee tonight, he said.

The Corporation will allow the student representatives to determine the meeting's agenda, Lee said. Students hope to discuss campus security, divestment and increased hiring of minority and women faculty, he said.

But the first item on the students' agenda will be discussion of an open meeting between the Corporation and the student body at large, Lee said.

In the spring of 1987, the Corporation rejected widespread student demands that it hold an open forum to discuss Harvard's South Africa-related investments and other issues. Instead, the Corporation invited council and house committee representatives to meet with it that spring.

After heated debate, the council agreed to attend the meeting on the condition that its representatives discuss only the possibility of a future open meeting with the board.

The council attended last spring's meeting with an open agenda, but Mandery, who was chair at the time, suggested that student representatives would refuse future invitations unless the yearlyconferences were institutionalized.

In May, President Derek C. Bok refused toguarantee annual meetings with undergraduates, butindicated that invitations would probably beextended every year anyway.

There does not appear to be any significantopposition to this year's meeting. Whileacknowledging that talking to the Corporation forone hour a year was not an adequate channel forstudent input into University governance, councilmembers said this spring's meeting could still behelpful.

"We're certainly not selling out," Lee said."[An open meeting] will probably be the firstthing we'll discuss. As long as students are stillinterested in it, we'll still put it at the top ofthe agenda."

And a divestment activist last night agreedthat the council should attend the meeting.

"I don't particularly trust [the Corporation]that they're doing it for the right reasons," saidRosa Ehrenreich '91, who chairs the PBH Committeefor Economic Change. "But we're stabbing ourselvesin the back if we refuse to meet them.