SHOULD STUDENTS SHARE THE POWER?
A STUDY OF THEIR ROLE IN COLLEGE
AND UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE
(Phila.: Temple UP, 1970)

Important excerpts
selected by Adam Kissel

EARL MCGRATH was United States Commissioner of Education and "Director of the higher education centers at Columbia and at Temple." His papers are available in the Hanna Collection on the Role of Education in the Twentieth Century, in the archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University:
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/library/hanna.html

     The involvement of students [in university governance, at a few institutions] inevitably stirs up certain questions concerning (1) the origins of their practices, (2) the reasons why other institutions generally have not adopted such practices, and (3) the possible usefulness of these unusual patterns of governance as models for comparable developments elsewhere. Specifically, why in the 1920's, when students in the higher education enterprise at large had no voice whatever in the formulation of academic policy, was Antioch able to inaugurate a set of broadly democratic procedures? This query requires a multifaceted answer. In the first place, the administrative leaders were men of innovative vision and firm conviction. Morgan and Henderson [at Antioch], and their successors as well, had a well-conceived philosophy of education which they articulated with such skill and sincerity that it drew the support of their associates. The history of American higher education reveals that, regardless of their varied educational ideals, the vision, conviction, and energy of such men as Eliot at Harvard, Harper at Chicago, Butler at Columbia, and Gilman at Johns Hopkins were largely instrumental in bringing to national eminence the institutions over which these men presided. So it was at Antioch. A thoughtful and inspired leadership, in which student involvement constituted only one element, was the dominant factor in the development there.
     Yet there were men of comparable qualities in sister institutions, large and small, some of whom saw the merits of many features of the Antioch plan. Why, then, after years of experience have demonstrated its worth, has the pattern not been widely adopted? The answer is simple. It has not been politically feasible. The majority elsewhere was dedicated to the status quo and had the votes to preserve it. (25-26)
     If the principle is accepted that students have a right to play a part in the determination of institutional policy, that they have a unique and valuable contribution to make in academic government, and that such participation should be an important part of their education, then even complex institutions can find the mechanisms necessary to reach these goals. Unless these propositions are accepted, the present tilting for power among the constituent academic groups will continue and the most sincere attempts at reform will abort. (30)

The steps which the Canadian universities and colleges have recently taken to bring students into academic government reveal what can be accomplished rather quickly when this goal is accepted by the controlling bodies. The Canadian experience is not as old as that of Antioch, but it may be more comparable to the problems in the United States because it does embrace institutions which vary in size, purposes, sponsorship, and complexity. In fact, the developments there can shed considerable illumination on the American situation because of certain similarities in the two systems. The developments particularly in the large and distinguished universities like McGill, Toronto, and British Columbia may suggest types of governmental organization that with appropriate regard to indigenous differences could be adapted to American usage.

Events in Canada tend to support the theory, expressed earlier in connection with the reforms at Antioch and elsewhere, that major governmental reforms arise out of critical situations. Although the enterprise of higher education in Canada was not in a severe crisis five years ago, certain deeply rooted traditions were under critical reexamination first by a single individual and later by the membership of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. This professional organization, at the outset at least, was not concerned with the problem of bringing students into bodies either like the academic senate or the board of governors. Their primary objective was to assess what they considered to be a declining position of members of the teaching staff in the whole structure of academic governance.

The activities of the professors' association resulted in joint action on the part of two organizations seriously concerned about making essential reforms while preserving the acknowledged strengths of academic government. Accordingly, the Canadian Association of University Teachers and the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada commissioned a British educator, Sir James Duff, and an American educator, the political scientist Robert O. Berdahl, to study the governmental structures and processes of the Canadian institutions of higher education. Their report, issued in 1966, reviews the extant government patterns and recommends a number of desirable changes based upon factual evidence, practical experience, and theoretical consideration. American institutions considering alterations in their own machinery of government will find the Duff-Berdahl report a rich source of information and suggestions for changes required to bring the academic establishment into viable adjustment with the evolving social and political conditions of contemporary life.

At the outset of the Duff-Berdahl study, neither in the United States nor in Canada had the student efforts generally to gain membership in the councils of colleges and universities reached the intensity exhibited at Berkeley and Columbia. It is not surprising, therefore, that the study gives more serious attention to strengthened faculty participation in university governance than to the role of students. As can be observed in the following statement, the authors do suggest the desirability of considering the future role for students in government:

The Duff-Berdahi report came out at a time when the members of the Canadian academic community had begun to accept the idea that the governmental organization required restructuring; and both faculty groups and governing bodies had already initiated discussion or action to that end. In the course of these events students intensified their agitation for representation in the reconstituted deliberative bodies.

Recognizing the impressive reforms in progress in Canada, the director of this study sought relevant information about them from the central office of the Association of Universities and Colleges in Canada and from the presidents of its constituent members. The generous response of these educators supplied a voluminous body of fact and opinion which made it possible to determine the extent and type of student involvement there, and to assess its transferability to counterparts in the United States.

A critical analysis of these materials validates the following tentative conclusions concerning the Canadian experience:

     1. With few exceptions the members of the Association of Canadian Universities and Colleges have brought students into the top policy-making bodies, which until very recently included only administrative officers, faculty members, and trustees-or governors, as they are usually called. Most of the institutions which have not made such structural changes plan to do so and some have only been delayed by the necessity of legally amending their founding acts. Of the thirty institutions responding, which include virtually all the major universities, ten have admitted students to the board of governors and four others are considering doing so in an early reconstitution of these bodies. A few boards have permitted students to sit as observers without giving them legal membership. Even though several respondents declared that they had no intention of adding students either to the board or to the senate, the force of general practice throughout Canada today would suggest that in time the prevailing policy will become universal.

     2. In the large majority of Canadian institutions students now generally elect or appoint their own members to sit on the senate and its committees. Since this body has broad jurisdiction over the educational program, admission and degree requirements, and the selection and retention of faculty members, students in Canada obviously enjoy an influential position far beyond that of most students in the United States. Only a few of the institutions which allow students to attend all meetings and to participate in discussions deny them the right to vote, and this atypical exclusion is in process of disappearing.

     3. Canadian administrative officers overwhelmingly believe that students are making valuable contributions to the deliberations of academic bodies. Some express the view that their experience of only several years requires caution in making predictions, but on the whole those with the longest experience consider student membership incontestably useful.

     The president of the University of Victoria provides a balanced appraisal of the value of student participation, within certain carefully defined limits, which he sets forth as follows: Students should not constitute a voting majority of any university-wide committee, they should not deal with appointments and tenure, and the participants should be truly representative of student opinion. Noting these qualifications, he identifies the following real benefits:

     Another judicious assessment of one university's experience with student involvement is presented by the president of the University of Windsor, who states:

     4. Not surprisingly a number of Canadian presidents expressed the view that some problems still remain to be solved. Among the most important are the proportion of students to non-students, the selection processes required to get the best-qualified representatives, the arrangements needed to assure a long enough term to maximize the students' potential contributions, a plan to free enough of the students' time to enable them to participate fully without damage to their scholastic work, and a number of like matters. No respondent suggested, however, that any problem yet visible would require reversal of the present trend toward student involvement, and some mentioned plans to enhance the student's role.

     5. Lastly, the evidence suggests that it would not be extravagant to conclude that the Canadian enterprise of higher education as a whole has become committed to the doctrine that students can and should play an important role in determining the policies and practices which shape their own higher education.

The experiences of Antioch and the Canadian institutions have been treated at some length because the former shows that in at least one small institution student participation has operated successfully for a half century, and because the latter shows that student representation in academic government has been adopted and works with initial effectiveness at least, in many institutions that are much larger and have academic traditions very similar to those in the United States. Moreover, the transition from older to newer forms of government was generally accomplished, if not with complete community calm and rational discussion, at least with far less upheaval and notably less primitive behavior than in a number of American centers of learning.

The example of Canada would suggest that in principle students could be similarly enfranchised in the United States. To achieve this goal requires first the admission that conventional academic government has become inadequate to the circumstances of late-twentieth-century life. No single formula of student participation can be applied to all institutions of higher education. Since some of the unique strengths of American higher education stem from variation and autonomy, the distinctive features of the institutions ought to be preserved. But within this proper range of varied practice there is room for students to take part. And the conditions essential to governmental reform now prevail. The widespread interest among students in becoming more centrally involved in the bodies which make academic policy and the progress already made toward this end suggest a widespread acceptance of the principle of student participation. Institutions only need to find the appropriate means. (31-37)

A SURVEY OF EXISTING PRACTICE

No comprehensive body of fact showing the extent of student involvement in academic government has existed before, as mentioned above; accordingly, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in late 1969 instituted this survey to determine how far the developments of student participation had proceeded. Because such a large body of detailed facts was produced, the statistics are reported in the Appendix. The main generalization which these facts permit is that although until three or four years ago American colleges and universities severely limited the involvement of students in academic government, now membership in one or another "faculty" committee is becoming the rule rather than the exception. The findings reveal that in the fall of 1969, 88.3 per cent of the 875 institutions that supplied usable information had admitted some students to membership in at least one policy-making body. It is, therefore, the atypical institution which has not moved in this direction, and such institutions are now for the most part actively considering doing so.

Those who believe that students have a right to a role in shaping educational policies will doubtless be reassured by the fact that almost nine out of ten institutions have already adopted such a policy. It would be a mistake, however, to jump from the foregoing figures to the satisfying conclusion that students are now m a position to exert strong influence on basic educational policy. Such an inference must be qualified by the facts exhibited in Table 1 (Appendix) about the kinds of committees on which students serve and their status in those bodies. No exhaustive documentation is required to demonstrate that, in terms of influence, membership in committees on social activities and entertainment, traffic and parking, homecoming, a spring festival, or a parents' day is not equivalent to voting status in the executive committee, the committee on the curriculum, on faculty selection and tenure, on admissions, or on degree requirements. Accordingly, specific information was gathered on the kinds of committees to which students had been admitted. (38)

For some two centuries the dominant decision-making agency in the colleges and universities of the United States has been the board of trustees. Typically this board has also served as the court of last resort when the rival claims of academic groups or individuals have required adjudication at a level above the administration. Charters or acts of incorporation often spell out in detail the trustees' comprehensive legal rights and responsibilities. Even where these rights and responsibilities have not been specified, the courts have generally construed the establishing act to confer sweeping powers and obligations on the board. Board responsibilities have customarily included the establishment of institutional purposes, the exercise of fiduciary supervision over resources and properties, the determination of the general character of instructional programs, the setting of requirements for admission and graduation, and the selection of the administrative officers and members of the teaching staff.

In view of the boards' extensive powers, this study attempted to determine their policies respecting student membership. The resulting data show that students participate much less commonly in the deliberations and actions of the trustees than in those of the faculty. Although over 88 per cent of the 875 responding institutions reported some student membership in some faculty committees, the percentage reporting membership in the board of trustees shows the situation in this respect to be quite different. Only 175, or 20.0 per cent, of the institutions replying had admitted students to board meetings, and even these few were apparently unwilling to enfranchise students since only 2.7 per cent gave them voting privileges. Moreover, many presidents reported that when the board met in executive session to discuss such sensitive matters as salaries or tenure, students were asked to withdraw. In a few institutions students have recently been made regular members of important standing committees of the board of trustees with full voting power. Stanford University's trustees, for example, in September of 1969, accepting a proposal of one of its special committees, admitted students to committees on academic affairs, buildings and grounds, finance, land development, and planning and development. After consultation in accordance with established procedure, the president of the trustees may appoint two students to each of these bodies.

Perhaps the most recent and the most radical changes in academic government were voted by the board of trustees of Otterbein College on June 6, 1970. The action of this body gave students an equal and full voting voice in all phases of campus governance, on the board of trustees, and in the college senate. Three students have been added to the board along with three faculty members, and students will have an equal voice in all matters of policy including the making of the budget, the shaping of the curriculum, and the hiring of the faculty. A college senate with equal representation of students and faculty members, and presided over by the president, will determine all final policies before they go to the board for approval.

Students will be regular, full voting members of the administrative council, the budget control committee, the judicial council, the academic council, the curriculum committee, the personnel committee, campus affairs committee, campus services committee, and several others. They will elect their own representatives to all these bodies.

In terms of structure, representation, and scope of responsibility, the new government at Otterbein College is the most advanced in the entire establishment of higher education. In principle it comes closer than any other extant model to establishing a genuine academic community with all members participating in the deliberative and legislative processes which determine major educational policy. It is, of course, untried in practice, but since all persons concerned were involved in its development over a two-year period, it may reasonably be expected to function with a minimum of friction from the beginning.

Some boards seem to be willing in principle to make drastic modifications of their organic structure to accommodate students, but before initiating the necessary legal actions, which it would be awkward to rescind, they want to have definitive answers to many questions which until recently have hardly been discussed. Among others, these queries include such items as the number of students to be admitted to the board, the procedure which should be used to select them, and the length of their terms. The few institutions which have already admitted students to the board have answered some of these questions. Students have usually been selected either by direct vote of the students themselves or by virtue of holding other offices to which students have elected them. In 56 per cent of the 175 institutions, students select their representatives by election or by ex officio position. In only 10 of the 875 institutions did the chairman of the board or the president of the college appoint students and only one co-opted students along with other board members.

These facts about boards of trustees show that students have not generally been admitted to a board's regular sessions, but in the few institutions where this is the practice, they typically also sit with one or another of the board committees. The committees to which students have most commonly gained access are, in order of frequency: the committee on student affairs, life, or welfare; on educational policy; on the selection of the president; on buildings and grounds and the design of the campus and its structures; and on development or public relations. A few institutions also include students in over thirty other committees with different names and functions, but the representation is negligibly small. Even where students regularly attend the meetings of the board and its committees, the force of their influence remains obscure because generally they have only the privilege of discussion. The participation of students in board deliberations today unquestionably represents an advance over traditional practice, but even now membership is distinctly the exception rather than the rule.

Most colleges and universities consider the faculty executive committee or a committee with similar responsibilities the most powerful policy-making body other than the faculty as a whole. Hence the membership of students in such a body might be considered a significant measure of their involvement at the highest level of academic government. As shown in Table 1, the percentage of institutions having students on their executive committees is 22.7, something less than one in four. This proportion is not high, but whether 22.7 per cent represents an acceptable or encouraging situation must be decided in the light of the fact that until several years ago virtually no college or university had students on any major committee. The figure gains added significance in consequence of the fact that in four out of five institutions where students sit on executive committees, they also enjoy full voting privileges and, therefore, constitute a somewhat more influential voice in academic government. Yet since over three-fourths of the executive committees in colleges and universities include no students, these developments in the establishment as a whole can hardly be considered revolutionary.

The curriculum committee is another powerful body which influences policies related to the reforms which students have recently proposed. Here students' reach for influence has been more successful than in any other body, for they have achieved membership in the curriculum committee in more than half of the reporting institutions. As Table 2 (Appendix) indicates, a notably higher proportion of the smaller and less complex institutions than of the universities-typically the liberal arts colleges-have admitted students to curriculum committees. These differences may have resulted from the absence of all-embracing curricular committees in complex universities, with dozens of different types of programs leading to degrees. Information gathered separately from medical and law school deans, and casual data from graduate units, suggests that, if all the various administrative units were considered separately, the percentages for the more complex institutions would rise.

A third major committee is that with responsibility for faculty selection, promotion, and tenure. As the history of the Italian universities reveals, the right to determine membership in the guild of scholars has been jealously guarded by the profession from the beginning. Even the all-powerful student guild of Bologna could neither seize nor abridge this prerogative, and the teaching fraternity today retains much of this power. The fact that administrators and trustees may have to assume responsibility for legal commitments to prospective appointees should not obscure the real locus of power, which is in the faculty itself. What has been said about selection applies with equal force to promotion, and with even greater rigor to permanent tenure.

Under these ancient mores, the likelihood of students gaining membership in committees on faculty selection, promotion, and tenure would seem slim. Prevailing practice bears out this a priori inference. Of the 875 institutions, only 41, or 4.7 per cent, have admitted students to committees which select and advance members of the professional staff; and in 12 of these, students cannot vote. Without these 12 cases, student membership on faculty selection committees falls to a negligible 3.3 per cent.

As Table 1 shows, a modest percentage of institutions have also added student members to other committees rather influential in shaping educational policy and practice, such as those on planning, lectures and public events, and admissions. These developments doubtless to some extent reflect the demands students have made in some places for more liberal speakers, less rigid and more authentic requirements for admissions, and open-housing policies. In any event, such progress as has occurred still leaves students in over two-thirds of the institutions without a voice in these areas.

In sum, it would be a mistake to conclude that because students do increasingly participate in the deliberations and actions of some institutional committees, they have now gained a position of decisive or even strong influence in the bodies concerned with basic educational issues. Indeed, in spite of larger formal involvement in policy-making, the position of students in the academic community could be misconceived it social trends in the United States since World War II were not considered. The tendency of these trends, described below, has been to reduce, rather than increase, the influence of students. Each external change or marked alteration in academic life itself has minimized for many students the sense of participation in campus decisions.

One trend widely noted by everyone, and criticized by students, has been the simple increase in size of the academic enterprise. Mass life on the campus, the impersonality of the educational process, the remoteness--especially in large classes--of the instructor from the student, the lack of opportunity for out-of-class contact with teachers, the mechanization and routinization of advisory and guidance services, and the objectification and quantification of evaluation procedures have all been unfortunate concomitants of rapid growth. At the same time students complain that the substantive content of instruction has often become irrelevant to the matters which they consider of transcending importance to them as individuals and to American society as a whole. They also object to the excessive fragmentation of knowledge among departments and disciplines, the preoccupation of putative teachers with research and consultation, the involvement of academic personnel in secret and war-related research, the discrimination against the economically and educationally underprivileged, the neglect of human qualities and social virtues other than narrow and abstract intellectual competence, the accumulating evidence of the negligible relationships between academic grades and any demonstrable evidence of later success in professional life, and the narrow prescriptiveness of the curriculum. (39-46)

RATIONALE FOR STUDENT PARTICIPATION

What specific reasons can be advanced for giving students a formal role in academic government? The most compelling rests on the generally accepted political proposition that in free societies all those affected by a social policy have an inalienable right to a voice in its formulation. In this sense, students are today not adequately free. Only through emancipation from the institutional restrictions imposed by others, and by full participation in academic deliberative and legislative processes, can they gain the status of self-determining individuals. Assured of these rights, they could play a not insignificant role in altering the policies and practices which they consider offensive to free men.

Students today, perhaps more clearly than any earlier generation, perceive the arresting contrasts between the democratic views of the members of the academic guild on domestic and international issues and the restricted human relationships they condone in the society of learning. With unprecedented awareness this generation of youth grasps the crucial relationship between education and human destiny. They understand that the amount and kind of education one receives largely determines his social status, his economic well-being, and the effectiveness of his participation in the life of his time. Aside from these private concerns, students recognize that universal and effective education is the sine qua non of our domestic well-being and our position among the nations. Accepting this momentous view of education generally proclaimed by the members of the academic establishment, they wonder why the microcosm of learning should not reflect the social philosophy and political practices of the larger society of which it is such an important part. If, as they are told, education is of such fateful significance, and if they are to be the recipients of its benefits, they are understandably asking why they do not have a recognized voice in determining its character and quality.

Another reason for students' involvement in governance relates to the concerns and motivations of youth today. Students' preoccupations suggest that they could be more thoughtfully effective than their predecessors in taking part in the reform of higher education. In contrast to earlier generations, today's students have a more serious and in-formed interest in the social, economic, racial, political, and international problems of their age. They have also become sensitively conscious of the potential therapeutic value of education in curing the ills of an ailing humanity. Unlike the teachers and parents of an earlier time, those of the seventies cannot rightly complain about the social, political, or intellectual apathy of most college and university students. In fact, the current complaint is not about lethargy, but the reverse, activism! Students are now concerned about the relationship (or the lack of it) between the exercises of the classroom, the library, and the laboratory, on the one hand, and their own existence and the conditions of life generally, on the other. Socially conscious as they now are, it is not surprising that die personal and social goals of students move them to be seriously dissatisfied with the unrepresentativeness of academic bodies and with the inadequacy of decision-making processes and the elephantine cumbersomeness of legislative action in colleges and universities. In this unprecedented intellectual concern and idealistic commitment, there is an immense potential for the thoughtful reconstruction of higher education and of American society.

A third justification for student participation in academic government stems from ubiquitously declared goals of American institutions of higher education. Educators, particularly social philosophers, consider the preparation of youth for the exacting responsibilities of citizenship in an increasingly complex democratic society to be one of the most important purposes of colleges and universities. Yet faculty members establish, or at least unwittingly acquiesce in, practices which deny students the right to learn about, and to become skilled in the exercise of, these civic responsibilities. Examples of such contrasts in profession and practice are easy to find. Consider the selection of the outside speakers who address students in a campus lecture series. Administrators and faculty committees make prohibitive decisions without consulting, or in direct violation of, student opinion concerning the persons they wish to hear discuss the issues which they consider vital. Similarly, faculties or trustees, as in some California institutions, have abridged the students' opportunity to receive instruction from persons who are unable to meet the academic establishment's inflexible qualifying standards, but who students consider especially fitted to discuss important problems of the day. Students believe that if they had a proper role in academic government, an important dimension would be added to their education and an indispensable element to their preparation for effective citizenship.

Fourth among the reasons for student participation in the deliberation of faculty bodies is that students could accelerate the correction of patent deficiencies in present curricular offerings. Even admitting the ambiguity and misunderstanding which now envelop the word "relevant," it is fair to say that many courses which students are now required to pursue do not prepare them very well to come to grips with the major problems of their personal and public lives. For a quarter of a century a small group of highly respected educators, like Robert M. Hutchins at the University of Chicago and James B. Conant at Harvard University, recognized that much college instruction merely prepares the student for further instruction and that only in the most derivative and remote sense can such teaching be considered to relate to life beyond the classroom walls. This fragmentation, specialization, and conceptualization of learning does not invalidate its usefulness for the minority of students who pursue it for vocational ends as, for example, candidates for the Ph.D. degree, but it does cause inexcusable gaps in the education of the larger majority. Since students far more than any other persons are where the educational action is--in the classroom--they are perforce better informed about educational substance and processes. The significance of higher education in the life of the average educated American would doubtless be increased if students sat on committees which determine the character and content of instruction.

Moreover, if students enjoyed membership in influential faculty committees, they might help in restoring some sense of unity and meaning to the infinitely varied course complexes which now constitute individual degree programs. The resolution of today's social, economic, racial, and philosophic issues, and the related human problems, requires that citizens have a more comprehensive knowledge and greater range of intellectual skills than undergraduate education now typically provides. The abject conditions of the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the ignorant and the means of their alleviation cannot be understood by "taking" a single course in economics, sociology, political science, or any other subject. Even when some portion of the content of such courses bears directly on the current circumstances of life, the inherent logic of a single discipline tends to limit the range of its application. Consider one example of the need for breadth of knowledge and skills in the intelligent solution of pressing problems in American culture. The social determinants of the life of the disadvantaged, and the means of their amelioration, must be approached from the position of not one or two disciplines, but from those of economics, psychology, penology, medicine, genetics, and political science, as well as other branches of learning. As students juxtapose their learning experiences in the classroom with the events in the world outside, they feel that their education is not sufficiently broad and relevant to the personal and social decisions their generation will be called upon to make if the human condition is to be improved. Rightly or wrongly, students believe that if they were given a voice in academic bodies, they could be helpful in bringing instruction closer not only to their own interests but to the conditions of modern life generally.

The Abolition of the Doctrine of In Loco Parentis

A fifth justification for student involvement concerns the general conditions, and the style, of life in the academic community. American institutions of higher education, unlike most of their European counterparts, have historically assumed the responsibility of acting on behalf of parents while their sons or daughters are in residence. Under the doctrine of in loco parentis institutions have regulated the lives of students and imposed the most objectionably repressive measures to govern their personal conduct. In addition to laying down scholastic regulations custodial supervision has determined the kinds of personal associations students could have, their right to leave the campus, their recreational activities, and a host of other private matters.

Many, even those who do not press for student representation in other areas of policy-making, feel that in respect to their personal lives institutions still improperly treat students like irresponsible children rather than like maturing adults. The unrealistic and futile character of this pseudoparental attitude is well illustrated in the comment of a coed in a college which includes work experience as one of the requirements for a degree. She observed that it was ridiculous to require a man to leave her dormitory room at eleven o'clock when during the previous six months she had entertained whom she pleased when she pleased and how she pleased in her South Chicago apartment. During the past several years, students have found these parietal regulations more irritating than any other rules. The choosing of human associations and the shaping of a private life, so long as these personal decisions do not restrict the freedom of others, ought to be experiences which contribute to the achievement of mature adult conduct. Since decision-making in respect to personal conduct is as essential a part of education as participation in the determination of more strictly academic policies, students can with equal propriety claim membership in academic bodies which make parietal rules.

The sixth, and perhaps the most persuasive, argument for student participation in academic government rests on the special and sometimes unique information students possess about the teaching-learning situation. Students have certain experiences which qualify them to make more reliable judgments than their associates among the trustees, administrators, or faculty members. These experiences concern matters related to, but quite different from, the content of courses or the substantive relationships among them discussed earlier. Students are peculiarly situated to make judgments concerning the faculty member's performance in discharging his responsibilities in the classroom. Since custom, if not ethics, prevents all others from viewing the instructional situation, students are the only group capable of gathering the relevant facts. Only they can day by day actually observe the practitioner's fulfillment of his professional obligations-his knowledge of his subject, his preparation for the presentation of specific assignments, his attitude toward and availability to students who may need additional help, and his conscientiousness in seeing that research and consulting do not interfere with his teaching obligations.

It is generally agreed that the large increase in the number of students in recent years has interfered with the carrying out of some traditional teaching activities. That too many teachers have too many students is generally recognized, and the consequent neglect of some students under present circumstances is unavoidable. But the allowance of outside professional activities to interfere with the work of the classroom has been less widely recognized, or at least less publicized. Yet the practice of neglecting some of the traditional responsibilities of college teaching has become epidemic. Since the end of World War II it has been a problem much exacerbated by the availability to an increasing proportion of faculty members of other types of preferred professional activities--doing research, writing learned articles, and advising corporations and the government. Some members of the profession should doubdess be permitted, indeed encouraged, to devote themselves exclusively to such non-teaching responsibilities, while others give their undivided efforts to teaching. Except in such recognized cases, however, students have a right to expect presumptive teachers to teach. If students, often the sole possessors of relevant information, were given an officially recognized role in evaluating individual faculty members on established criteria of acceptable teaching performance, they might assist in the correction of the present inadequacies in teaching.

Although the case can easily be made for a role for students in the reform of teaching, it is significant that of all the policy-making bodies to which students have gained access, the committee on faculty selection, promotion, and tenure falls near the bottom of the list. Only 4.7 per cent of the 875 reporting institutions have admitted students to committees on faculty appointment, promotion, and tenure, and in only 3.3 per cent do they vote. Yet it is the faculty members who provide (or do not provide) effective instruction. When compared to the much larger percentages of membership in other committees, these figures seem to justify the inference that the profession more often favors student involvement in committees which set other policies than those which pass judgment on the effectiveness of its own membership.

Students are beginning to recognize that the character and quality of their education will be determined not so much by the kinds of persons who occupy trusteeships or administrative offices, but by the qualifications, the interests, the attitudes, and the dedication of the men and women they meet in the classroom. Moreover, they are coming to realize that the kinds of teachers they have will to a considerable extent be determined by the role students play in their selection. With students on no more than 4.7 per cent of committees on faculty selection, promotion, and tenure, their progress toward gaining this kind of influence is clearly negligible. It has often been said that the quality of education a particular institution offers is determined by the kinds of faculty members who serve it. Since students increasingly recognize this fact of academic life, and since they feel that they have constructive criticisms to make with respect to their education, they believe that they ought to have a voice in selecting staff members and evaluating their professional performance.

OBJECTIONS TO STUDENT PARTICIPATION

The foregoing arguments in favor of the involvement of students in academic government, as persuasive as they are to some, leave others unconvinced. Many informed and sincere persons firmly believe that if students gain an authentic voice in academic government, the ends of higher education will at best be confused, and at worst subverted. Their reasons for taking this position deserve thoughtful consideration.

The critics' most serious question on student participation has to do with the power structure within the academic polity. The locus of power in colleges and universities is a complicated and somewhat obscure subject, which an analysis of the related legal documents is more likely to obfuscate than to illuminate. Although the cure of the maladies which now afflict the academic organism requires a discriminating diagnosis of the political forces now at work, a proper examination of this matter lies beyond the scope of the present discussion. Nevertheless, until such a review has been made, one aspect of the power structure must be given attention in any consideration of the objections to student participation.

Some opponents contend that the admission of students to important academic bodies would so alter the balance of power within them that, in fact, virtual control would shift from the board, the administration, and the faculty to the students. The antagonists to student participation do not usually spell out the theoretical results of such a realignment of control, but they do point to their concrete manifestations in some of the recent "non-negotiable" demands of activists. They show that these ultimata have included virtually the full range of institutional policies and practices. Student groups have made efforts (sometimes successfully) to eliminate individual courses and indeed whole curricula which they found objectionable and to introduce others they favored. They have caused teachers and administrators of whom for one reason or another they disapproved to be removed and other acceptable substitutes to be appointed. They have been able to halt the erection of some buildings and to initiate the construction of others. They have caused the radical revision of admission standards and the inauguration of elaborate new advisory systems. The evidence is conclusive that students have already effected many basic changes in American higher education.

And most of these results have been accomplished without official status. Witnessing all that students have achieved with the sanction of neither law nor custom, those who oppose their participation fear the more radical changes which authentic involvement might be expected to bring.

A second objection to student involvement concerns their youth and limited life experience. Critics consider the behavior of today's students, especially undergraduates, at times capricious and frivolous, at other times inflexible and dogmatic-in a word, immature. A judicious observer will not overlook the fact that these judgments rest largely on the behavior of students in those institutions whose turbulence has recently been the center of national attention. On these campuses many have acted with little or no regard for conventional codes of behavior. They have unconscionably violated the rights of other members of the community and capriciously established their own value system for the appraisal of human conduct. They have created their own dogmas, sometimes more unyielding than those they have been designed to replace. They have failed to display the kind of balanced judgment which is supposed to characterize the cultivated mind. In brief, however valid the students' animadversions against the academic establishment may be, critics believe that youth's efforts at reform have often lacked the intellectual and emotional restraint associated with maturity. Defenders of students say that this is too much to expect from young people in their late teens or early twenties. The opposition promptly agrees with this judgment and cites it as their primary reason for not giving students a decisive role in academic government.

In the matter of student participation the members of the profession voice a third reservation. They point out that most students, especially the numerous undergraduates, spend only four years in any one institution, and many spend only a year or two. Under these circumstances some of the more permanent staff members question whether even the most earnest students can acquire the perspective and the commitment essential to sound judgment on long-term policies. These senior professionals doubt not only that students can deal prudently with the issues and problems related to the destiny of a college or university, but that they can deal wisely with the personal well-being of the large company who have cast their lot with it. A typically brief association, it is contended, will predispose students to be interested primarily in policies of immediate benefit to themselves.

Critics cite an increase in tuition fees as an example of conflict between immediate personal and more permanent institutional values. To prevent a rise in the cost of their education, students have demonstrated against the imposition of higher fees. Yet a balanced concern for the long-term quality of the faculty and the general maintenance of standards might at a particular time require acceptance of such an action. Similarly, the adoption of fashionable but exotic curricular proposals may satisfy the passing fancy of short-term residents, but may not be in the best interest of institutional stability and economic soundness. The critics buttress their view by pointing out that students' indifference to long-run institutional welfare is confirmed by the shallow and transient concern of alumni, whose devotion to alma mater, once they have gained the degree, rapidly evaporates. Many faculty members, some of whom give a whole professional life to a particular institution, contend that neither their own nor the institution's welfare should be placed in the hands of those with such ephemeral commitments. That this view does not spring from a prejudice against students is proven by the fact that it has been applied to young faculty members in the lower ranks, who, because of their probable short service, are denied faculty status. The argument based on the shortness of institutional affiliation is one which advocates of student participation have yet to deal with adequately.

A fourth objection to a larger role for students in academic government is related to, but differs basically from, the shortness of the students' institutional affiliation. It is also related to maturity but specifically concerns one of its components, specialized abilities, and embraces the rich complement of comprehensive knowledge and special skills that is involved in the broad practice of a profession. The components of understanding, esoteric knowledge, and seasoned judgment that characterize the expert and confident practitioner of any profession are acquired slowly. Yet, to an extraordinary degree, those who have risen to the highest pinnacle of professional success have exhibited these essential and unique qualities. One need only mention such names as Charles W. Eliot, William James, Sir William Osler, and Joseph Storey to prove the point that genuine professionalism comprises not only a complex of specialized knowledge and skill, but a keen awareness of the meaning of a calling in relation to the larger human enterprise.

Now, to be sure, not all members of a profession such as teaching, even those with senior status, achieve the fullness of knowledge and the ripeness of judgment characteristic of its examplars. [sic] All do, however, grow in these respects as they practice their craft. This is especially true of college and university faculty members whose profession not only permits, but requires, the evaluation of prospective policies within a larger social context. If the forward motion of the academic enterprise is slow, it is in part because its members are sensitive to the values they have a moral responsibility to protect and preserve. Knowing as they do how priceless and yet how tenuous are the privileges of academic life, faculty members are loath to share responsibility for their preservation with the uninitiated. They object, therefore, to enfranchising students in regard to matters with which they can at best be uninformedly sympathetic and at worst callously indifferent.

A fifth objection to student participation comes from some educators who oppose it not in principle, but for the practical reason that in the nature of things students cannot give the time necessary for a faithful discharge of their responsibilities. Those critics who have had the experience of meeting with committees for several hours a week some-times for a full academic year or more know what a distractive burden such activities can be. They doubt whether even the ablest student could devote the required large proportion of his out-of-class time to committee work with-out adversely affecting his educational progress. The experience of entirely sympathetic academic administrators here and in Canada where students have sat on faculty committees supports this a priori conclusion. Some students have offered similar testimony either by direct statement or by their increasing absence from meetings as the growing burden of work has interfered with their academic obligations. Moreover, as students realize the weight of the responsibilities imposed by their obligation to report what has transpired in committee to their constituency, the whole student body, and to seek a consensus on at least the most important issues under discussion, they find themselves in a serious moral conflict. They have to choose whether they will neglect their studies at great personal sacrifice or neglect their representational obligations at the expense of their fellow students. Many unbiased persons believe that until some way is found out of this dilemma, it is delusive and futile to advocate or accept student representation in academic policy-making bodies.

SUMMARY

An evaluation of the arguments advanced for and against student participation in academic government permits the drawing of some practically useful, if not definitive, conclusions. In this unsettled stage in the evolution of new mechanisms for academic decision-making, no one can be dogmatic or authoritative about which policies will finally turn out to be unassailably sound, and which impracticable. In addition to those involving students, various other experiments are now being tried in academic government. They include innovations relating to the composition, structure, and functions of boards of trustees; the relationships between the board, the administration, and the faculty; the functions of the central administration and the departmental heads; and beyond these internal groups, the political relationships with the sustaining constituencies whether they be taxpayers or private donors. These and other matters relevant to any full treatment of academic government lie outside the scope of this paper. Even if these factors had been included, the fact that they are all in a state of flux may in time result in their having a quite different bearing on student participation than they do at present.

Nevertheless, the available body of fact and informed opinion does suggest some potentially useful conclusions about the merits of student participation and the conditions under which it would most likely benefit the establishment of higher learning and more importantly enhance the education of its patrons.

     1. The weight of opinion and practice indicates wide acceptance of the idea that students should have some voice in the bodies which determine the purposes and the programs of institutions of higher education. Since virtually every committee to one degree or another deals with matters which affect the character and the quality of the students' education, and since students' experience may often shed peculiar light on these matters, it is reasonable that students should hold membership in all such deliberative bodies. Since, however, the interests and potential contribution of students would inevitably vary in accordance with the differences in specific responsibilities between one committee and another, the proportion of student representation should doubtless also vary.

     2. Except those on the radical fringe, almost no members of the academic society contend that because students are the most numerous citizens of the commonwealth of learning, they should uniformly have majority representation in its deliberative bodies. On the other hand, the idea advanced by the most adamant representatives of vested scholastic interests that student involvement eventually means complete confiscation of political power is no more than a red herring. Canadian institutions with substantial if brief experience with student involvement, as well as the few in the United States with traditional participation, testify that after a brief period of adjustment to their newfound power, students generally behave with customary academic decorum and consideration for their associates; and even where they consider their representation disproportionately small, they do not demand numerical dominance.

On one aspect of the balance of power between students and faculty members and the administration, experience sheds particular light. The assumption that continuing conflicts of interest among these groups will cause a constant splitting of the vote along party lines is denied by the facts. Where students have been admitted to faculty committees, they have not precipitated a partisan polarization of views. Students and faculty members rarely line up in opposing camps, even though at times selfish interest would move them to do so. At Antioch, for example, there have been only two instances in years in which the students and the faculty members on the administrative council have been irreconcilably divided.

Anyone who has had experience with the indissoluble factional differences among the members of faculty committees would not consider the danger of polarization a defensible argument against student participation. Where faculty and student groups have deliberated together, differences of opinion have usually been resolved through discussion and the results have led to a consensus acceptable to the larger constituency. To be sure, some institutions, in view of their traditions, could ab initio not achieve democratic working relationships. But there is no apparent reason to assume that running feuds between students and non-students would result from a mixed membership in academic bodies.

     3. In maturity of conduct and judgment, students seem to vary with their experience and their length of service in deliberative bodies. The responses from presidents here and in Canada indicate that in their first meetings some students tended to be defensively aggressive and needlessly talkative. On the positive side, faculty members and administrators with experience reported that students do introduce into committee discussions points of view and facts which other participants may not be in a position to have. To this extent students enrich the policy-making process and make the outcome more acceptable to those who have to live under it.

This generalization must be qualified with the observation that those institutions which have had the longest and most successful record of student participation inaugurated it when life in the United States at large and on the campus in particular differed markedly from the conditions which prevail today. These changed circumstances do not necessarily argue against student involvement. On the contrary, they suggest the very reverse; that is, greater student participation may be required to solve some of the current problems involved in adjusting higher education to the social conditions of life in the seventies. But the needed changes will probably be more smoothly accomplished if the altered context of reform is understood.

This presentation advances the case for student participation on the basic principle that undergirds any free social order: that citizens generally ought to have a voice in, and are capable of, determining the character of the social institutions which in turn determine the character and quality of their own lives. A large percentage of students today believe that they do not have such a voice. At the same time they consider theoretically invalid and pragmatically unsound some of the prevailing academic policies and practices. Thoughtful observers of the present breakdown in the traditional conditions in academic life differ in their ideas concerning what reforms are needed and how they are to be accomplished. But they exhibit a considerable consensus that students must play an influential role in the revisions of these policies and practices. Hence the circumstances of life in institutions of higher education reveal that the issue whether students should be involved in governance is now academic. The question is not whether students should participate, but how, to what extent, and through what innovations in organization and procedure this involvement can be most expeditiously and effectively achieved. (51-71)

It would be an exaggeration to say that any substantial number of high school students would choose a college or university because it assured them full participation in policy-making. Most prospective freshmen are not that knowledgeable about the politics of academic life. Many students will, however, decide to remain in an institution on the basis of their feeling that they play or do not play a role in decision-making. (78)

An entirely different conception of the academic community and of the values which invest its purposes and activities is required in any defensible reorganization of its government. The basic plank in the new academic political platform ought to be the idea that the dominant mission of the institution is the advancement of education, not the enhancement and strengthening of party groups. And the word "education" requires broad definition. It must include every influence and condition of living in the academic community which shapes the lives of those who come there to be educated. A definition may begin with the substantive material transmitted in the classroom, the seminar, the library, and the laboratory. It may also emphasize the didactic processes by which formal knowledge passes from the teacher to the student. But in terms of the findings of modern psychology relating to the educational impact of the whole environment and the indispensable value of the students' full intellectual and emotional involvement in the learning process, such a narrow conception of higher education is indefensible. Every force in the community which shapes the mind and character of the student must be considered educational. The broadest but not necessarily a numerically equal representation of all its members will assure the fullest consideration of the issues involved. In this process students have a contribution to make to the discussions of educational theory and practice.

The ends of education and the means of realizing them deserve first consideration in restructuring academic government and in reconstituting its membership. New mechanisms are needed to unite the interests and muster the efforts of all constituents of the academic society in the enhancement of the welfare of the whole membership. No one can predict with exactness the benefits that will accrue from bringing students into deliberative and legislative bodies. To what extent such a modification of academic government will help in focusing the discussions and the actions of these organizations on the needed reforms in higher education remains to be seen. It is clear, however, that the reforms that have already occurred in educational institutions and in society at large have abundantly demonstrated that unformalized student intervention in the conventional activities of academic bodies has been effective. (92-93)

The discussion of the feasibility of student participation must deal with certain practical problems (in addition to the problems of proportionate representation, selection, and voting rights) which now constitute obstacles difficult to remove. Administrators and students questioned in this study report that some students find membership in academic committees prohibitively burdensome. In the first place they must spend considerable time in gaining an understanding of the kinds of problems various commit-tees deal with, and they must find this time without impairing their scholastic standing or their economic status.

If they are to prove the value of their involvement by discharging their duties creditably, students must acquire the knowledge and experience necessary to come to grips with the important decisions committees make. Anyone familiar with such subjects as institutional purposes, ad-mission requirements, or curriculum content will testify that an extended experience is required to gain insight into the intricacies of the problems these matters involve. A short term in faculty and board committees makes it difficult for anyone to become versed in the esoteric responsibilities involved. Hence even students with the ablest minds and most cooperative spirits may lack the general knowledge of institutions of higher education and their complicated relationship with society essential to sound judgment. The difficulties already encountered even in the institutions which have made the most sincere efforts to bring students into academic councils confirm the need for a longer term than is now common. Unless students' terms extend beyond one year, or unless they can spend hours in specific preparation for their duties, they will normally lack the expertise required for sound judgment. The inadequacy of their knowledge does not preclude students from having a role in academic policy-making. It does imply unusual dedication to the task of acquiring the prerequisite knowledge and the available time to do so.

The other problem which must be solved to make feasible the participation of many students in academic bodies concerns the economic sacrifices they would have to make. The transaction of the normal business of standing committees would drain away valuable time from their studies, but in some cases it would deprive self-supporting students of income without which they could not continue their education. The exorbitant commitment of time has already caused some students, after a rather brief adventuresome period, to question the financial practicability of giving the time necessary for a faithful discharge of their duties.

A clarification of the obligations implied in the phrase "a faithful discharge of their duties" would make committee work less burdensome. If a common misunderstanding of the functions of various groups in academic communities were corrected, a marked reduction could be made in the amount of time members now spend in official activities which ought to be delegated to others. The events of the past several years show that a considerable percentage of faculty members and almost all students fail to recognize the separation of powers and functions necessary for economic and efficient operation in any organization. The entire academic body, or its subgroups, should properly be involved for the deliberative and legislative processes which establish major policies. Only a few designated persons, however, ought to be responsible for putting these policies into effect on a day-today basis. Such duties must be assigned to qualified administrators who are given extensive discretionary authority.

In too many institutions the functioning of democratic government is misconceived, and a host of committees spend endless hours reaching decisions which by delegation of authority should have been handled by administrative officers. This prodigal practice involves the misspending of valuable time which faculty members should more properly use in teaching and research, and students in study. Moreover, experience suggests that this wasteful practice often produces no more judicious decisions than those made by administrators operating within established policies. If academic bodies limited their activities to the making of major policy, their work would be less time-consuming and, therefore, more feasible for students.

Even with a proper delimitation of committee functions, however, colleges and universities which admit students to unabridged membership in board and faculty committees will have to take two actions to ensure their effective participation. First, ways will have to be found to enable students to give the necessary time without impairing their scholastic standing. One such device could be a policy under which the institution treated students' participation in the work of a regularly constituted faculty committee as a creditable educational assignment. The intellectual and political experience a student would have as a member of a group dealing with the crucial issues of institutional operation could be as educationally rewarding as course requirements. In fact, such an arrangement might facilitate the efficient conduct of business sometimes delayed by the unavailability of persons with time to gather data and to prepare systematic reports on matters under consideration. Some type of tutorial system could enable students to perform these services without retarding their academic progress. Under controlled circumstances it would be an educationally sound practice to reduce required instructional obligations and to award commensurate academic credit to any student who faithfully discharged his commit-tee responsibilities.

The other barrier which excludes students from academic government is the need for gainful employment during the college years. The dominant purpose of those who attend an institution of higher education should be to pursue their studies. Some of the economically less favored can achieve this goal, however, only by simultaneously earning a substantial part of their living expenses. The American custom of permitting students to earn their way has immeasurably equalized educational opportunity and escalated social mobility, and has thus enhanced the quality of our national life. It is a practice that should be encouraged. Hence, since young people who need current income could only assume committee responsibilities if their consequent loss of income were otherwise offset, they ought to be fairly compensated from institutional resources. Since faculty members and administrative officers are paid for such activities as part of their regular professional responsibilities, a similar arrangement would seem to be equitable for students. In any event if students who are financially self-dependent are to be involved in committee work, some arrangement must be found to pay them. (96-99)

I am convinced that one major reason why American higher education until recently has been free from exclusive concern with narrow abstract intelligence has been the fact that education in this country has been legally controlled by lay boards of trustees. ... Yet while other nations move toward a more egalitarian philosophy and practice of education, a school of thought is rapidly growing in this country that American higher education would be elevated in quality if the members of the academic profession had exclusive responsibility for the making of academic policy. The social implications of this idea are extensive, grave, and largely unexposed to public view. (58)