Employment Hazard

One never knows who may to scrutinize his post. It's may be a prospective employer, in which case the records to college extracurricular affiliations kept in University Hall are a boon. Or it might be the local investigation committee. Disputes over the membership list requirement usually center on this somewhat hypothetical, but nonetheless menacing, possibility, but recently the Council has attacked it on both counts.

For one thing, according to the Council, those who want to parade their record before a personnel manager often discover that some of their affiliations were lost between Dean Watson's office and the Registrar's some were never recorded, and some were set down inaccurately. For another, graduates may find themselves saddled with college associations which they would prefer no one else remembered.

The Council set itself the task of repairing this system without affecting its value to the Dean's Office, which is concerned with keeping organizations free from outside control and of students on probation. The result of its exertions is a plan which would make one of the Houses and the Freshmen Dean's Office the repository for membership lists. Lists for all organizations would be kept on record for one year, and students would be able to select those groups which they want permanently on file. Through various devices, including inspection by undergraduates themselves, the chances of mistakes and omissions would be diminished.

This is fine so far. But for some reason, Council members seemed to think that this plan requires scrapping one of the rules revisions they recommended last Fall: "... substituting a provision requiring groups to show, not give, membership lists when applying to use Harvard facilities." Currently concerned with the Harvard facilities." Currently concerned with the trouble unpopular associations may cause undergraduates in the future, they have forgotten the trouble it may cause them while in college. It may be unlikely that anyone would subpoena membership lists out of War son's office, but it is legally possible.

There is no reason to subject unpopular groups to this risk. The Council's new plan would work no less smoothly if a few groups could present their lists periodically instead of putting them on record for a year. In fact, since members of unpopular groups who object to being on record for a year are usually the ones who would scratch their names from permanent listing, there would be fewer revisions needed when the time came to shift records from temporary to permanent status.

Nor would the Deans lost anything by abolishing compulsory lists, since they could still assure themselves of organizations' purity whenever they pleased. All that would be gained by maintaining the current rule is the continued frustration, if not strangulation, of groups espousing unpopular ideas. To make their proposal complete, Council members should modify it to include their earlier and sounder recommendation.