Overlap of Committee Responsibility

Can the overlap of various committees and groups be eliminated? For example, the CHUL Educational Polices subcommittee and ERG-CUE overlap in their concerns, and both overlap with the Student Assembly Committee on Educational Resources.

Fragmentation of College Governance

Can more form and coherence to the various faculty-student committees and all-student groups be provided? Can mechanisms to improve coordination and efficiency be suggested?

Selection/Election Procedures

Can ways be found to insure that election/selection mechanisms to various governance committees especially Standing Committees, become more uniform, better understood, and more widely known?

Funding for Student Government and Undergraduate Organizations

Can ways be devised to provide funding so that governance groups can more effectively carry out their responsibilities? Newsletters, open meetings and polls are all mechanisms that are useful in informing the student body and soliciting student views. These mechanisms require money and at the present time, no source of funds exists that can be used by the various groups for such purposes.

Governance Needs and Responsibilities

Can additional or improved mechanisms be devised to aid and implement student input into decision-making processes within the College? Are there governance responsibilities that could or should be assigned to students?

IV. A Plan for Governance

The various issues and problems that emerged from our review of present governance structures at Harvard suggested that a more centralized student government organization is needed. We believe our plan provides this.

We have fitted the existing governance groups into an organizational structure, without the need to create new committees. Indeed the plan calls for a reducation in the total number of committees and, we hope, a significant reduction in committee overlap. The one apparent exception to this is our proposal to divide CHUL into two separate student-faculty committees. However, we also suggest that each of these two new student-faculty committees be less than half the size of the present CHUL committee.

We have also tried to incorporate into the plan those organizational features of our present system that work especially well. For example, we have used the best features of the ERG-CUE model for all three student-faculty committees. We also call on the House Committees to play a larger role in college governance. A flow diagram describing the plan and how it relates to the Faculty, Faculty Council, House Masters and Administration is shown on page 18.

A Student Council and its Role in Governance