All Tied Up

Is our student government supposed to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Office of the Dean of Harvard College, or is it supposed to be something even remotely autonomous?

The first application of the Undergraduate Council's bullet-in-the-foot Nelson-Grimmelmann Act suggests the former. The Act submits selected council resolutions to the Dean of the College for endorsement. Its supporters claim that resolutions which pass both the council's ratification process and the Dean's review will give the U.C. more credibility.

On the contrary, Messrs. Nelson and Grimmelmann! What your Act does is to fundamentally erode the legitimacy of the council as a representative student body, guarantee the council a long series of humiliating and disenfranchising slaps in the face, and narrow its interaction with the administration.

What happened with the silly "first-year" proposal is only the beginning. The council recently proposed a small change to replace all official uses of the term "freshman" with "first-year." Per the Nelson-Grimmelmann Act (hence-forth "The Shackle"), the proposal was submitted to Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 for review. The Dean rightly rejected the proposal.

Aside from the fact that "first-year" is an ugly word and the entire debate is, as one female professor was quoted as saying, a "non-issue," the term "freshman" doesn't strike me as gender-oppressive in any way. The council has infinitely more important matters to occupy its time; why it has embarked on a cleansing of the English language is beyond me.

This is by no means the first time that the council has staked its heart and soul on a non-issue, but it is the first time--and it will by no means be the last, as the Dean's recent ROTC veto proves--that the council will suffer the repeated blows of The Shackle, whimpering and licking its wounds each time a resolution is rejected by the Dean on principled grounds. With each rejection, the council's legitimacy suffers; its perceived competence decreases; its subservience and addiction to administrative vindication grows.

This is a lousy way to ground a policy process: taking what is under one's own control and subjecting it to veto by a party with a different constituency and different interests. The Shackle is a self-imposed corrosive on the council's credibility; by subjecting council resolutions to such a potentially damning process, council members betray a terrible insecurity over where their true base of support really lies. The Shackle seeks the Dean's endorsement as a poor substitute for what it should be spending time seeking: endorsement and validation by students.

The institutionalization of an administration review of council legislation--as opposed to a simple political dialogue between two separate parties--is a symbolically and procedurally crippling move. How can the council claim to represent students, sometimes on issues which may be directly or tangentially opposed to College policy, when it regularly goes to the Dean's Office for petty validation? As if the support of the Dean will translate into greater student support.

In a political dialogue, the Dean will support those council resolutions he agrees with, without the formalization of The Shackle and its guaranteed public rejections of council legislation. The Dean seems to imply this when he writes, "I don't think that a succession of narrow and specific proposals sent from Harvard Hall to University Hall to be vetoed or approved discretely is a sensible way to forge College policy." Without The Shackle, both parties--the Dean and the council--maintain some semblance of separateness, something that is more in the council's interest to maintain in any event.

The Shackle over-emphasizes the council's interaction with the Dean of Harvard College, at the cost of the multitude of positive relationships it can form with the entire spectrum of administrators: Dining Services, UHS and the House Masters, just to name a few. Why not extend to all these parties a veto over council legislation?

Break the chains, council members! Run free!

Patrick S. Chung's column appears on alternate Saturdays.