A story is going around about the president of RUS. She visited the dentist's, where he told her, "My God, girl, you've got to stop smiling so much--your teeth are beginning to buckle!"

Last spring, RUS didn't have much it could depend on besides the diplomatic smiles of Deborah A. Batts '69, its new president.

So this fall, the slowly-emerging realities of RUS may come as a shock to some Cliffies, especially when all they can remember of student government is their high school student council, which they probably never served, and RGA, which never won any claims to student support.

For the first time in a long time, Cliffies have a student government that promises them real dialogue with the administration, and a real focus for their demands and energies.

During last week's labor crisis with the kitchen help at Radcliffe, for example, RUS beat SDS to printing a fact-sheet on the dispute. Some students found themselves looking to RUS for announcements of new developments, while last year they ignored the weekly RGA bulletins.

Students are beginning to expect more from RUS too. They are suggesting RUS meeting as the place to bring up complaints about such long-standing issues as student jobs and parietals. Students are more aware--and less skeptical--of RUS as their own spokesman.

The College administration, too, feels that RUS is opening up unexplored lines of communication between students and the College staff. Non-voting student membership on administrative committees is relatively new and untried.

Under RGA, the only regular College committees that students could serve on were the Judicial Committee, which met only rarely, and the Radcliffe Policy Committee, which was really separate from the College's decision-making apparatus. A total of five students each year sat on these committees.

Now, fourteen students will have the opportunity to sit on eight committees being formed with members of the College staff. The committees range from Policy on Admissions and Financial Aid to the group that studies undergraduate life. Some of these student positions are already over-applied. The RUS executive board will select the committee members this week.

RUS has also invited administrators to join seven new student committees, from the Student Activities and Conferences Committee to the By-Laws Committee, which considers statutes for RUS.

Mary I. Bunting, president of Radcliffe, feels that this increased interaction between students and administration is a good thing. "We want all the input from students, as well as residents and employees, that we can have before we make decisions," she said last week.

She particularly praised RUS for their diplomatic persistence last spring, even though intransigence on the part of both the administration and the students then threatened to kill the new student government. "We never stopped communicating, and that was good," she said. "At a time when students want communication so much, when they isolate themselves, that's too bad."

The cooperation between RUS and the College Council almost ended before it began last spring, when the Council rejected four drafts of the RUS constitution. Cliffies had voted to abolish RGA during the winter, and were left without recognized representation until May, when a fifth version of the constitution was finally approved by both the Council and Radcliffe students.

The obstacle to quick administration approval last spring was RUS's insistence on regular, non-voting membership on the College Council, Radcliffe's highest decision-making body. This would have made communication easier and more direct than in the past, when they were limited to various student-faculty committees. Regularization of student participation in the Council remains one of RUS's top priorities.

"We could have had a formal agreement last spring," Debbie Batts said, "but that would have been a compromise." According to Miss Batts, the College Council was "unwilling" to approve a plan for regularization, and RUS was equally unwilling to put anything "softer" than that into a constitution that might be hard to change later.