The faculty in-fighting continued throughoutthe spring and for a good part of the next year,as the FAS shaped a new system for facultygovernance and created a permanent--andpermanently controversial--committee to overseecampus discipline.
Pusey, concerned about the intense divisionswithin the faculty, had created a Committee onRestructuring in February, 1969 to investigatemethods for creating a new faculty governancesystem. Led by Pforzheimer University ProfessorMerle Fainsod, the group was composed largely ofmembers from the conservative caucus.
"I kind of lost my faith in the faculty,because they didn't make the decisions along theline and they let this thing fester until it gotto the point where you had to have real surgery,"Pusey said in a recent interview.
Before 1969, the faculty was overseen by theCommittee on Educational Policy (CEP), a groupwhose membership was appointed by the dean of theFaculty. When specific issues needed to be lookedat, the dean would appoint a special committee toinvestigate.
"[The dean] had to convince the faculty thattheir general views were represented, butnonetheless, he appointed the committees," Maasssaid. "But there developed a demand that thestructure become more democratic."
Faculty members say there was a growing feelingwithin their ranks that unless the faculty hadsome elective governance structure, only thoseprofessors whose views were parallel to then-DeanFord's would be represented. As well, many of theyounger faculty members believed that studentdemands for increased involvement in the runningof FAS should be met.
After all the debates of the previous spring,the Pusey-appointed Fainsod Committee finallypresented its report to the faculty in the earlyfall of 1969. Professors say that the FainsodReport was almost entirely amended after intensedebate to create the Faculty Council, the18-member elected faculty body which is still thecentral structure for faculty governance.
Some professors contend that the most importantchange resulting from the creation of the FacultyCouncil was the institutionalization of thestudent input to faculty decision-making. Underthe terms of the agreement, seats were reserved onvarious faculty committees for studentrepresentatives.
Students, however, continued to assert thatthey were not adequately represented, and mostradicals felt that even the most 'liberal'professors did not really have students' interestsat heart during the protracted debates aboutgovernance.
Still, faculty members contend that the changeswere important steps towards democratizing FAS'structure. Yet some professors say now that thechanges in the faculty could have occurred lesspainfully if professors had not been as concernedabout the militant political mood of the students.
By the early 1970s, the liberal andconservative caucuses had ceased to meetseparately, faculty meetings had returned to theFaculty Room in University Hall, and attendance atthe meetings dropped off to its normal, sparselevel.
But faculty members are still quick to add thatthe tensions which divided them in the spring of1969 did not die quickly. "It took some years forthe faculty to recover from the intensity of thedissents and disagreements that divided us thatyear," Maass says