Elections

DO YOU KNOW your Student Assembly representative's name? If you don't, and most students don't, that pretty much sums up the problems the assembly has had in its one-semester life. After all the hoopla about town meetings and referendums and "the students' voice," the assembly came up smelling like the U.S. Congress. Politics became personalized--you could get elected by getting enough friends out--and any issues ended up in resolution-passing, rather than any real action.

There is a ray of hope, however. Today and tomorrow, in the election of new assembly representatives, the Coalition for a Democratic University (CDU) is pushing that assembly to become more issue-oriented by putting up a slate of candidates running on the same platform. The CDU calls, rightly, for democratizing the CRR and the ASCR, open meetings for University committees, more aggressive affirmative action and so forth. But these issues are not the real issue.

The real issue is student participation in this University's decisions, and even CDU hasn't quite figured that one out. The CDU's own statements illustrate the difficulty of working within the assembly structure. Pronouncements like "The assembly must work to channel the mandates of students' opinions in University policies" and "The Student Assembly should form a committee... [to] make recommendations" and "The assembly must encourage..." all leave the assembly essentially in the business of resolution passing.

But the CDU does have a prescription for this problem in at least one area--that of academics and student participation in curriculum decisions. The CDU recommends that the assembly work to establish departmental student committees to apply leverage within departments on such decisions. This is a realistic and pragmatic approach to the lack of student participation--within the small unit of most departments, such an organization can make its presence felt and have much more impact than any assembly resolution on the subject.

The departmental student committee approach should be a model for the CDU's efforts: organizing to influence each of Harvard's decentralized pressure points, using the town meeting structure, for instance, to apply pressure to the Houses. If Harvard can ignore 3000 marching students on the South Africa issue, how will any assembly resolutions change their minds? As long as the administration has its own version of student participation in the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life (CHUL) and the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE), the assembly will get nowhere on housing policy or broad education policy.

The central problem for the assembly is that it needs to establish its channels--channels to the University administration, to have input, to influence decisions, as well as channels to students, its constituency, without whose active support it doesn't even have a voice. The CDU's proposals, emphasizing the need for student influence, are the first step in that direction.

The Student Assembly may fail, both at representing students and at having impact on Harvard. The very structure of the assembly contains too many alarming tendencies toward hot air. But the assembly hasn't really tried either representing or influencing yet. The CDU slate of candidates in today's and tomorrow's elections may at least try.