Point of Order

When the Student Council shot over the head of he Faculty to appeal directly to President Conant on he issue of membership lists as a requirement for recognition of an undergraduate group, it may have trained the bounds of protocol and procedure, but it lid not overstress the importance of the problem. The question of the membership lists requires a full and air hearing in the Faculty, and we hope that the Council's breach of order will not dissuade the Faculty from giving this matter its attention.

Membership lists may seem a simple matter of administration to the Committee which drew up the rules for undergraduate groups. But in view of the present pressure against heterodoxy in our society, it has become far more than that. In this seemingly small issue, the Faculty must decide its entire policy regarding political activity--whether it will guard jealously the right of Harvard students to form themselves into a recognized group for expression of their opinions, or whether it will sacrifice that right in the interest of some vaguely-defined protection of the University's "good name." It there is any place where people should be free to organize for political expression without fear of later being declared guilty by association, it is the free university. Once that freedom is lost in the universities, it is lost completely.

The Faculty discussion should not consist merely of hearing a report by the committee on how well the present rules reconcile principle and expediency, but also of a serious investigation into the position which a university should take at a time when the pressures are strongly toward orthodoxy. A question which now seems only to involve "left-wing splinter groups" may next spread to moderate left-wingers, and so on. This is definitely something for the Faculty to think about, seriously and soon.