Faculty members on the committee are unanimous in agreeing that the recommendations that were adopted significantly improved communication between Faculy and administration. While Faculty members disagree how effectively the new committees manage to share decision-making authority with students, they all say students now have a great deal more input than in 1969.

The committee's report also emphasized the restructuring of Faculty governance. Pusey's decision to call the police to clear University Hall, and his complete lack of consultation with the Faculty (aside from a small group of deans) infuriated most Faculty members and engendered a widespread distrust of many of the administrators involved in the decision to make the bust. In addition, the lack of communication between the Faculty and the Corporation, Dean Ford's own disagreement with the Faculty vote on ROTC and his admitted frustration at trying to speak for the entire Faculty, the hasty drafting of legislation on the floor on Faculty meetings--all these combined to convince many Faculty members that the time had come for a greater Faculty voice in the administration, and in running its own affairs. To accomodate this sentiment, the report proposed "a larger administrative role for the Faculty than it has exercised hitherto." The committee recommended establishing a 20-member Faculty Council to act like a Congressional committee or subcommittee--to screen and report on legislation, to oversee educational policy, to foresee committee appointments, and to plan priorities for Faculty growth and development. The council was designed to grant a larger number of Faculty members the chance to participate in designing educational policy in cooperation with the dean of the Faculty. The report also instituted a docket committee to set the Faculty agendas, rather than allowing the dean of the Faculty to do it himself. Finally, in a tactfully worded statement that nevertheless appeared to express the Faculty's anger toward many administrative deans, the committee called for most senior deanships to be filled by teaching members of the Faculty.

The Faculty largely accepted the recommendations, but imposed a change in the method proposed to select the Council's members. The report had suggested the traditional method of allowing the dean of the Faculty choose the members, with competing slates if Faculty members desired. Thomson and Levin say they tried to insejt a clause in the report that would mandate the election of Faculy Council members. They were overruled by the committee, only to be upheld by the Faculty after furious canvassing by both the liberal and conservative caucuses.

The committee recomendations on student decision-making would have been viewed, only a few months before the strike, as unacceptably radical. "I strongly believed the Faculty and students should have more directly to say about the way the University runs," Levin says now, and the report echoed his, and other committee members' convictions. "We are persuaded that present arrangements for exchange of ideas between students and faculty on matters of common educational concern leave much to be desired," it read, and it goes on to envision a set of student-faculty committees as forums for open discussion of issues affecting student life and education. The Fainsod Committee thus called for a student voice in shaping policy related to student housing, extracurricular activities, and broad educational policy, but it specifically rejected a model of total democracy. Instead, the committee argued to exclude students from voting on such matters as tenure appointments and final curriculum decisions, because, it said, a professionally trained and experienced Faculty would make more informed decisions.

But the committee did envision a full student voice in determining policy on housing, undergraduate social rules, and contributing to the discussions of educational policy: with equal student-faculty ratios on the CGE and CUE.

While these recommendations doubtlessly resulted in a vast improvement over the frustrated system of communication that prevailed in 1969, Faculty and students today disagree how significant the committee's changes actually were. Most Faculty say the Faculty Council is a welcome and effective institutional innovation, although, as Gleason notes, much enthusiasm for participating in the Council has largely died. "As I think our committee expected, people were scrambling to get into politics, and it's hard now to get people. What I've always felt is wrong is that the people--both Faculty and students--who want to get involved are politicos, and those aren't the people I want to hear from," he says.

Controversy still surrounds the issue of student input into decision-making. From their own experience with the communication breakdown in 1969, most Faculty stress the improvement over ten years ago. And many students who have served on CUE or CHUL say they believe they have significantly contributed to decisions the committees make; the faculty members actually listen to what they have to say, and sometimes change their minds, they report still, one student active on these committees says there remain a number of structural problems that prohibit real representation of most students' views, problems that inhibit completely frank discussion. "Students on these committees don't like being accused of being co-opted, but the structure is inherently defective. Students as a whole don't feel they are represented and the representatives don't feel like they have a constituency.

Despite these structural inadequacies, Levin says he believes the report and the turbulence of 1969 accomplished a great deal. "The lesson was learned. The tight little groups that controlled the University, without knowing much about it, learned the lesson of consultation," he asserts. Whether students of 1979 share his conviction is another matter. For it is clear that the Faculty, not the students, benefitted the most from the April uprising, not by Machiavellian planning, but simply through increased access to power. With the Faculty Council, a reorganized bureaucratic structure, a new president who maintains a considerably warmer rapport with Faculty members, and a greater voice in its own, and the University's affairs, the Faculty achieved a quiet revolution. Of course, the question of whether students will remain content with keeping their own voices subdued remains a serious question that Harvard continues to face.