The Graduate and Professional Schools Council (GAPSC) is picking up the pieces and hoping they fit somehow.

The student group is struggling to fit together the disparate interests of the students of the nine graduate schools and define its own role within the University.

Members of the conglomerate group say that unless they manage to unify the very diverse students into one community this year, the council may well self-destruct. The council was formed three years ago to promote unity among Harvard's many graduate schools.

The council members, who are elected either from the student body of each school as a whole or selected from individual student governments, say that they can make such a unified whole only by becoming a powerful social and political force in graduate student life.

Because many of the nine schools are geographically isolated--with the medical science schools a 20-minute bus ride away from most of the other schools--graduate and professional students say that they have little idea of what is going on at the other schools. They add that a unified graduate student voice will be better able to influence University policy and implement changes.

"We want to be able to share our ideas, our thoughts and our experiences with the other grad schools," says James Schaefer, former vice-chairman of the Council and currently a representative from the Businesss School.

"It's a shame to be stuck in [one's] own corner and not know what else is going on," says Alice Finn '84, a Law School student and the current chair of the council.

Three years ago a group of graduate students banded together to form a group to meet these concerns, says David Schwartzenbaum, a Law School alumnus who helped found the council, After being recognized by each of the graduate schools' student councils, in the fall of 1986 the students drafted a constitution which allows each school to select representatives as its council wishes.

Early last year, the council representatives stepped up their efforts to bring the graduate students together. The GAPSC organized social functions, service projects and intramural sports to acquaint graduate students with one another.

But the council encountered one major obstacle.

Because the student group was not recognized by the University, many of its proposals became trapped in the workings of the various schools' bureacracies.

"We wanted to rent Mem Hall [for a dance], but we couldn't, because no one school could take responsibility for the party," says Finn, who is in her fourth-year year in the Law School's Fletcher program.

So early in December, GAPSC sent a letter to President Bok asking that the University officially recognize the council and give them a faculty advisor to act as mediator and be responsible for the group's projects.

"Our main goal is to get full recognition," Schaefer says.

Right now we have quasi-recognition."