Key Points

Within the next two months, the Crimson Key Society will come up for review before the Student Council. The Council should certainly approve the Key, which has been doing a good job as the University's official welcomer; the problem which the Council and the officers of the Key will have to tackle is the revision of the Society's badly-conceived constitution.

As it is now set up, three groups handle the Key's administration. The care of the organization is a 37-man Executive group made up of representatives from most major undergraduate teams and activities. It is supposed to be the Key's policy-making body. The legwork in the Key is done by another group of members, the Associates, who are chosen from among candidates competing for the Society. They have no vote on policy. The officers and committee-chairman, drawn from both the Associates and the Executive Group, form a nine-man cabinet, planned as an advisory group.

This setup has severe defects. The Executive group, which was supposed to make policy, has turned out in practice to be too large, and its representatives too poorly informed on the Key's activities, to be successful. This unwieldy Executive needs either to be pared down to a workable size or restricted to advisory power. The Associates are in the unfair position of doing all the work and having no vote in Key Policy. Their position offers very little prestige, since the Key is a new organization and not well publicized. In all fairness, the Associates should be given some vote in the Key's policy, and adequate publicity for their work.

The Cabinet, designed originally as an advisory body, has proved in actual practice to be a natural policy-forming body. Its members are informed and active participants in the Key; the Executive group has acted more or less as a rubber stamp for the Cabinet's decisions. The cabinet should be made officially what it turned out to be in practice: the main policy-making body.

The Key has done a fair job under a very poor organization; with a new constitution containing these revisions, it could go much further. Though the Key has made some mistakes in its first year, it has done a great deal of useful and undramatic work. The college now supplies an official welcome to its visitors where its hospitality not so long ago, as Dean Bender pointed out, "bordered on rudeness."