Graduate Panel May Dissolve; Elections Yield Few Delegates

The Graduate Student Panel yesterday considered dissolving itself because only 15 of the 45 departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences have elected representatives to the panel, but postponed making a final decision until next week.

Twenty-six departments have not held elections for representatives to the panel, and four of the 15 representatives had been elected by promising to work towards dissolving the panel. Four other elections resulted in a decision not to send a representative to the panel.

The outgoing panel members voted last week to recommend that the panel be dissolved. Jean Agnew, a graduate student in history and a member of the panel, said then that the vote was based on graduate student feeling that the panel served only to co-opt graduate student protest.

Yesterday's meeting included all the new representatives and eight members of last year's panel.

The Graduate Student Panel is a group of graduate students, supposedly elected from all the graduate school departments. The function of the panel has been to represent graduate student opinion on questions of finance, workload and other student-faculty matters. Representatives from the panel are elected to the Committee on Graduate Education, a student-faculty advisory body which this year formulated a need-based financial aid plan.

Barry Harrington, a graduate student in physics and a member of the outgoing panel, said yesterday that he thinks the departments did not elect representatives either because they were actively boycotting the elections, or because of a deep student feeling that the panel is ineffective.

Burton S. Dreben '49, dean of the GSAS, could not be reached for comment yesterday.