Because meetings are closed, it is not clear how much influence the student minority can exert at the meetings. Two years ago, one of the graduate students on the committee resigned, charging it was a rubber stamp for administration policy. During the same year an undergraduate member published a dissenting budget report, criticizing the majority budget report as overly concerned with Princeton's financial status, and calling on administrators to set a budget that would preserve what he called the university's "educational endowment." He suggested considering more seriously a proposal to spend the endowment's principal in order to maintain Princeton's quality of education.
But despite their lack of statutory power, Princeton students have still succeeded in influencing university policy; adequate information and a receptive administrative ear have enabled them to convince administrators of the correctness of their positions.
Brown: University as Participatory Democracy
The stereotype of Brown-that of an activist student body--also categorizes Brown's student government. Students sit and vote on several faculty-dominated policy-making committees, and have frequently won over the administration with their arguments. And although final power lies with the administration, the central student government often tries to influence the high honchos with the results of university-wide polls.
Brown's central student government, the Undergraduate Council of Students (UCS), consists of 31 students elected at large. Like Princeton's USG, the Brown council's only statutory responsibilities consist of appointing students to the student-faculty committees and distributing funds to undergraduate organizations. Brown's student activities fee of about $25 per student yields about $130,000 in funds for the UCS. The UCS in turn funds about 100 student organizations.
Student polls provide the UCS with a potent weapon for swaying the administration. "The tradition in the past is that before we do anything, we take a poll," Michael L. Mael, vice chairman of the UCS, says. Past polls have questioned students on subjects ranging from their opinion of Brown's health service to whether the members of a student-faculty committee should resign in protest of the body's ineffectiveness.
A current poll asked students whether they favor reform of Brown's current calendar, which places exams after Christmas vacation. Brown President Howard R. Swearer, who favors calendar reform, asked the UCS to survey the students; the council will present the results of the poll to a faculty committee studying the issue.
Several student-faculty committees provide students with the opportunity to vote on policy. The Educational Policy Committee, where students sit as voting members, has authority to approve or disapprove proposed courses, concentrations, and independent concentrations. Students also vote, along with the faculty, as members of the Undergraduate Council on Student Affairs (UCSA), a rough equivalent of Harvard's Administrative Board. Only the president may overturn UCSA decisions. Students arrested for activities in support of Brown's striking workers last year decided to let the UCSA hear their cases. The board acquitted them.
Yale: Government as Lobby
Except for the power to distribute funds to undergraduate organizations, the Yale College Council (YCC), Yale's 27-member student government, has no bottom-line authority. Nor do the student-faculty committees to which it appoints members. But this lack of tangible power has not prevented the council from making itself heard on a variety of undergraduate issues.
Yale's current strike gave the YCC an opportunity to show its stuff. At the start of the strike, Yale was able to operate the freshman dining hall by assigning white-collar employees to work the kitchen, and gave upperclassmen a daily allowance to purchase food, because all other dining halls were closed. But believing that freshmen should not be forced to cross picket lines by eating in the dining hall, the YCC voted to request that Yale offer freshmen the daily stipend on an optional basis. Administrators denied the request, but after meeting the YCC officers, Hannah Gray, Yale's acting president, agreed to the change.
The YCC has not shied away from taking a stand on the strike, either. In addition to calling for both parties to begin negotiations, the council passed a resolution supporting the union's demands for greater job security. However, the YCC passed a resolution hostile to some of the union's demands for a wage increase. Other YCC members, working independently of the council, convinced the union to drop its request for a gradual phaseout of student jobs.
"We play on the fact that the administration doesn't like to get students too angry. Our real power is the potential to get students out to demonstrate and show that they're angry. We're not so much a government as a lobby," Segall vice chairman of the YCC, says.
In keeping wit Though the student governments at these three schools vary in function, a core of powers, practices and problems is common to all. In each school, students have been permitted a foot in the door to power, by membership on advisory and policy-making bodies. In each, students are slowed by insufficient information and a lack of genuine authority to set policy. In each case, success in opening the door wider depends on students' ability to convince administrators that they truly represent student opinion, and to lobby administrators with polls, demonstrations and facts. Issues such as these have confronted the roughly 50 delegates to the Harvard convention that has begun the process of writing a charter for a college-wide student government. Whether the government these delegates from--if they form one--will gain sufficient credibility and effectively mobilize student opinion, as the Brown, Yale and Princeton governments have done on occasion, is another question.