An Empty Room

The cancellation notices drew little attention at first, but then more and more began arriving. By last year's end, a third of scheduled monthly Faculty meetings had been axed. Heading up each of the notices of cancellation was the same explanation: "There being insufficient business ready for action...the Dean of the Faculty has recommended, and the Faculty Council has agreed, that the Faculty meeting of [date] be omitted."

Insufficient business?

During roughly the same period, various committees on campus debated a number of ideas that could potentially alter University life. From affirmative action to technology transfer; from a new student government to the old, but still controversial Committee on Rights and Responsibilities; from pass-fail courses to make-up exams; from a shortage of Core courses to growing pains in the Social Studies concentration; from race-related problems to conflicts with Cambridge residents; issues arose that struck at the heart of student and Faculty life. Yet the full Faculty of Arts and Sciences met only a half-dozen times and dealt with only a handful of those issues.

If last year is any kind of yardstick, the Faculty might as well not bother to clamber up the steps of University Hall to convene at all. Members of the Faculty Council, which simplifies and then forwards proposals to the full Faculty, are predicting that 1981-82 could be unusual for the very dearth of controversial issues that could confront the Faculty. Though the year is bound to contain some surprises--like the fairly sudden emergence of last year's technology transfer issue--the preliminary Faculty agenda looks about as empty as Ronald Reagan's White House in August.

Three issues that sparked some debate last year remain for the Faculty to polish off, but observers expect all to be approved swiftly once the council forwards them. The first, the Dowling report for a new student government, drew overwhelming Faculty support in a non-binding straw vote last spring. Once the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life (CHUL) formally ends discussion of several proposed amendments to the Dowling report, observers say the Faculty will approve the plan that will pave the way for a student referendum which, if passed, would give funding to the proposed student council by the start of the next term.

The Faculty should dispose of the second pending issue--the reorganization of the Biology Department--even more quickly. For nearly a decade, the department has been divided into two subgroups--organismal and evolutionary biology (OEB) and cellular and developmental (CDB). The two groups have operated "pretty autonomously" in recent years, John E. Dowling '57, professor of Biology who is supervising the division, says, adding that recent increases in the size of the department have made it too large to be run effectively as one big unit.

The Faculty Council met last year with Biology professors and tentatively supported formally dividing the department, but it sent department members back to iron out administrative arrangements. Specifically, the council pointed out that even though OEB and CDB each already selected their own graduate students and made their own appointments, the two groups still had not worked out what Dowling calls "all the little bugs" involved in departmental mitosis.

Now the department has resolved its administrative difficulties, and Dowling predicts both the Faculty Council and Faculty will approve its plan immediately. The swiftness of approval may reflect the minimal impact the reshuffling will have on undergraduates: a unified undergraduate Biology curriculum will remain, and a committee will administer the undergraduate program on a day-to-day basis.

The drafting of a new University statement on professors' conflicts of interest, the third substantive issue held over from last year, excited much discussion in the Faculty Council last spring. However, this year's debate, first in the council and then in the Faculty, is expected to be anticlimactic.

The council came close to approving a new conflicts-of-interest statement put forth by the Committee on Research Policy (CRP) late last spring, only to decide after four meetings that the CRP proposal was vaguely worded. On the other hand, the council affirmed the CRP recommendations for broad changes in University policy, including the formation of a committee that would deal with professors with potential conflicts. The CRP also pushed for recognition of "conflicts of commitment" in addition to what Paul C. Martin, dean of the Division of Applied Sciences, calls "the old-fashioned financial conflicts of interest."

Phyllis Keller, associate dean of the Faculty for academic planning, recently finished revising the CRP report (the original "took too many words to say things," she says), and she expects the council to approve it at an early meeting. Because of the council's fundamental agreement with the CRP's ideas, council members expect quick approval as well. The proposal "went through so many damn drafts that my suspicion is they'll do it straight off," Edward L. Pattullo, a member of the CRP, says, adding, "It was simply a matter of style."

There could be some surprises, though, since the proposal would change longstanding University policy. For example, the proposal would alter the Faculty's statement on conflicts of interest for the first time in more than 15 years and would make professors responsible for reporting potential conflicts to any member of the new committee. In spelling out the possibility of a "conflict of commitment"--a professors's involvement with an outside group that detracted too greatly from his teaching time or energy--the new statement might also make professors more likely to report such involvements, like time-consuming consulting jobs, to the new body.

Some faculty members may perceive the statement as stiffening requirements. Dean Rosovsky, to whom professors currently report, has said that very few professors have formally sought him out to inform him of conflicts of interest. Faculty discussion of the new statement could also rekindle debate on one of last year's hottest issues--the role the University should play in outside commercial endeavors. That issue arose after the University approached a professor of Biology about becoming a shareholder in a genetic research company with which he was involved. After all, as Martin notes, the idea of revising the conflicts-of-interest statement "got raised as part of various questions of University involvement in outside activities" that surfaced in Faculty debtae last fall.

Those three holdover issues--the Dowling report, Biology's mitosis, and the conflicts-of-interest statement--while important, will probably excite less controversy than an issue which is not on the Faculty agenda but which most council members say is bound to confront the full Faculty before the year is out: a proposal by the Gay Students Association (GSA) calling for a formal University policy forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The council denied that request last year, issuing instead a statement deploring harassment on campus. Members now say, however, that the heated debate that action provoked, and a Faculty by-law allowing any professor to raise an issue during a Faculty meeting make its reappearance inevitable--particularly since GSA leaders have pledged to seek discussion of their proposal by the full Faculty. As David Layzer, Menzel Professor of Astrophysics and a Faculty Council member, says, "Any Faculty member can bring it to the Faculty--the council can't prevent it."

Council members, for the most part, say Faculty debate on the GSA measure would probably not change the council's decision to deny the request. They note that the council, as a body elected by the entire Faculty, is probably representative of Faculty opinions. But some say the impact of a public meeting before the entire Faculty (council meetings are closed) could conceivably tilt debate toward the GSA's stance.

This year's Faculty agenda may center around issues left over from last year, but next year's actually looks fresher. Sidney Verba '53, the new associate dean of the Faculty for undergraduate education and chairman of the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE), will kick off discussion with CUE on what he calls "the rules relating to college study."

If that sounds like an awfully broad agenda, it's because Verba intends it to be. "Rather than looking at things on a nickle and dime basis," he says, he will look at "the whole structure of [academic] rules to see which ones are inexplicable or inconsistent." Verba says the "full package of proposals" he will eventually present will likely address topics such as honors requirements, make-up exams, regulations for adding and dropping courses, and other issues that turn up in the Handbook of College Rules.

Though he acknowledges that the Faculty's uncrowded agenda might make this "a good year to bring [the package] to the Faculty," Verba says hurrying his deliberations would be "a mistake." Accordingly, his goal is to have his proposals before the council by the year's end, so that they could reach the Faculty a year from now.

But until Verba and his package of new rules arrive to lift the Faculty's meeting schedule out of the doldrums, it looks as if there may be another spate of cancellation notices. At least, that's what John R. Marquand, secretary to the Faculty, predicts. He contrasts this year with last, when--despite the three cancellations--the technology transfer issue got the Faculty off to a "'rip-roaring start" and heated debate about minority hiring and the Third World Foundation kept things interesting. Just one factor prevented the Faculty from meeting more often: a widespread belief that a body as large and unwieldy as the Faculty should not grapple with issues until other bodies--like the Faculty Council--had first simplified them.

Still, Marquand notes, an alternative to cancelling meetings wholesale does exist. Back in the mid-1970s, when the Faculty had "a little bit of a problem" getting its quorum of one-sixth to show up, "there was a feeling that there was so little to do that it would be nice if the Faculty could get together to have tea." And so, each month that meetings were scrapped, assorted professors congregated and sipped tea. With this year's ho-hum agenda, and with a pervasive feeling that the full Faculty shouldn't take on an issue until everyone else has handled it first, it might not be a bad idea to recall that old tradition