EDITORIAL: "Competing Voices"

Perhaps the voice professors hear at University Council and elsewhere stutters with um's and hesitations, is punctuated by like's, sometimes cracks, and often sounds nervous, over earnest, and too deferent. And perhaps students are also to blame for losing a voice they fail to use as often and as successfully as they should. But professors are being foolishly consistent in holding Council to an old "understanding" about equivalent faculty representation on every committee regardless of the committee's area. Professors are also being somewhat condescending to students in offering their "institutional memory" to the University at large. Last semester, professors successfully lobbied University Council to achieve majority representation on the Safety and Security committee. This action acheives nothing tangible for faculty, and at the same time risks drowning out student input. What's funny is that professors probably did not think they needed more representation on the Safety and Security Committee -- except in a political sense. According to University lore, the Faculty Senate originally joined University Council under an assurance that Senate would receive majority representation on Council committees. Professors have been integral to the accomplishments of the Safety and Security Committee, as well as other Council committees. Yet, there is no strong argument that the committee's work will somehow be improved by the addition of two faculty members. Faculty were already having their security concerns addressed. Professors are neither the primary suppliers nor demanders of a safe and secure campus. After five o'clock, most return to homes in other parts of the city, in the suburbs or even in other states. While faculty live in Narberth and Merion and Washington, D.C., students live at 42nd and Lancaster. Students have their bikes stolen. Students have been raped in the Quadrangle. Students walk home from Smoke's to their off-campus houses at two in the morning. But there are only two undergraduates on the Safety and Security Committee. Including the chairperson, there are seven faculty members represented. These professors claim "institutional memory" beyond a student's four years at the University. But if five professors ever failed to recall some tidbit of University lore, would seven necessarily remember? And more importantly, how often have the University's safety and security concerns and policies in 1967 applied to the committee's work today? Since faculty have never been severely underrepresented on the Safety and Security committee, "institutional memory" only tells students that professors think they can represent our interests for us and will know what's best. Students can represent themselves. It's just two against seven that's difficult. Because of the risk to student input, we don't think the faculty need the larger, increasingly disproportionate role they have demanded on committees such as Safety and Security. We look to professors for lectures on calculus and selected works of literature, not lectures on how to protect our bicycles and prevent acquaintance rape.