Dept. Will Retain Soc Rel 148, 149

The Social Relations Department this week decided by a narrow margin in a ballot taken through the mail to allow Soc Rel 148-149 to continue next year with control over the course remaining in the hands of the course's teaching staff.

The department voted to add an advisory board of three faculty members to the course but stipulated that the committee members would be selected by those teaching the course.

Roger W. Brown, head of the Soc Rel Department, said that the committee would insure that the course was not "a thing apart from the department." He felt that the advisory board could serve two purposes: first, it would play a consultative and advisory role for the staff and, second, it would increase communications between the course and the department. After the decision, Jack Stauder '61, instructor in Social Anthropology and head of Soc Rel 149, would not make a definite statement about whether he intended to continue the course next year. He called the three-member supervisory group, " a sort of snoop committee," and charged that the committee was one of several efforts being made to restrict and repress the course.

Stauder said that another such effort was the decision made earlier in the spring to review student section-leaders by the departmental Committee on Undergraduate Instruction. He said that now he suspects that students disciplined for participation in the University Hall takeover will be rejected next year. "It was inevitable we would be restricted and repressed if we were giving a good radical course at a University which serves reactionary interests," Stauder said.

Brown said that the purpose of the decision to review the students was to make sure they had "good cognitive qualities" and not just the "right political persuasion."

Soc Rel 149 staff members plan to formulate a statement for next week which will announce the future of the course as they see it and explain their reasons for such a decision.