Student Membership

Heyns and ASUC representatives, during their Christmas recess meetings, talked mostly about the constitution of this commission. McIntosh was concerned that the proposed commission, to be composed of five faculty members and five students, might be so dominated by the faculty that it would ignore student sentiment. This is precisely what happened to the doomed "Campus Rules Committee," another joint commission set up after FSM which was supposed to establish lines of communication between students and the university.

McIntosh admits that he feels uneasy about the proposed commission. "It really wouldn't give us what we need," he explains. "Savio has a point when he says that they can let us serve on millions of joint committees and it won't mean a thing until we have at least a fragment of autonomy."

What McIntosh thinks Berkeley "really needs" is a student "political activities committee" that would work with a similar faculty committee "to review and rewrite all university rules regarding political activity." As McIntosh sees it, the faculty committee would set up "guiding principles and policies" which would then be worked into more specific rules by the student committee.

"Until there is some student organization on this campus that actually has some status, there's going to be trouble," McIntosh told the faculty last month. "The administration can continue to claim that they discipline justly and that existing rules are not ex cathedra but were actually written by students. But as long as Berkeley students have no access to rule-making, we have a legitimate complaint."

McIntosh and the students he represents hope that the non-student issue, to which the local papers devote a disproportionate amount of attention, will disappear once students are really given some voice in policy-making. With insight that most adult Califorians lack, Page vanLobensenls, another ASUC officer, tried to explain to newsmen why most striking students seemed so unconcerned about the fates of the non-students who led them.

Creating Non-Students

"People like Mario and Karen are so well-liked that most strikers might actually feel guilty if they thought the issue of non-students was really being ignored," vanLobensels said. "Mario, especially, is really a 'living monument,' like the newspapers say. But those of us who've been around Berkeley a long time realize why Mario and Karen are non-students. The reason is that the rules are made by distant and sometimes arbitrary figures in Sproul Hall, and administered by those same people. When a student -- like Karen -- is cited once for breaking a rule, one of the little deans up there will testify that she broke the rule and say she deserves to be thrown out. The Committee on Student Conduct, who hears these cases, believe that without any real proof expect the

The real issue on campus is student (not non - student) power.

"I don't think the non - student types are tuned in any more." dean's word. That's why Karen was suspended."

VanLobensels and McIntosh feel that if the rules were made "visible" and some "clear form" of judicial review for student violators were set up, the non-students who are former students -- like Savio and Mrs. Lieberman -- might actually be pacified. The administration, too, which has refused to readmit both these notorious "non-students" might come to see that "the situation is no longer explosive. They'd see that it would be in their interest to readmit both of them," McIntosh says.

It is becoming apparent to other observers that what McIntosh and vanLobensels talk about so lovingly is never going to come about. Administration spokesmen say that the university is extending itself as far as possible when it offers the 10-member joint commission. No one in the state of California is really willing to grant the students the autonomy they want.

Heyns, who wrote a PhD. thesis on the "Effects of Variations in Leadership on Participation Behavior in Discussion Groups," can explain the turmoil at Berkeley in sociological terms. "I know what they're after," he told a press conference. "Eventually they'll get around to talking about a student court. But I've seen such a thing in operation at other schools and, let me tell you, it can be disastrous. Students can blithely hand down judgments on their peers that even the harshest faculty committee would consider outrageous."

Sharing Blame

Heyns admits that non-students at Berkeley are really not solely responsible for the agitation there, as California newspapers claim and Californians believe. "Unfortunately, they are aided and abetted by some of our own students who share this hostility toward the university," Heyns explains. "It is apparent that we have lost some of the ground we had gained in our efforts over the past two years to build a genuine campus community. I understand that there were some weaknesses in the Campus Rules Committee, but I think this joint commission can discuss all the reasons for this development. All of us, including the administration, through misunderstandings or errors, have doubtlessly contributed."