Council members debate body's role at U.

Each month, faculty, students, staff and administrators sit down for two hours in McClelland Hall to talk about the University. They make up the University Council, an advisory body to the president and provost that includes members of every constituency in the University. Council moderator and Political Science Professor Will Harris said his goal "has been to have Council be a place where discussion takes place, where concerns are raised with response and reaction following." According to former Secretary of Council Robert Lorndale, the University Council was started in the early 1960s in an attempt to bring various committees together under one umbrella. At its inception, the organization did not include students. "It was a meeting ground really for faculty and administrators," Lorndale said. Students became part of the Council in the late '60s. "The Council with its committees gave students a voice," he said, adding that Council helped to keep the University on an "even keel" during the sometimes traumatic events of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Harris emphasized the advisory role of Council now, saying that the administration is not "required to take our advice." "We don't make the policy," he said, bringing up Provost Stanley Chodorow's recent decision to reject the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education's proposal to amend the University calendar despite Council's unanimous approval. "I think it was a mistake, but he had the right to do it," Harris said. "That doesn't make us irrelevant -- the president and provost do always owe us an explanation for why they've done what they've done." Associate University Secretary Constance Goodman, who serves as the Council's current secretary, said the advisory panel is very important to the University since it provides the sole forum where "direct advice is given to the president and provost." Assistant to the President Stephen Steinberg, whose role in Council is to "support the president," said the discussions make Council an important body. "The strength is certainly that the quality of discussion can sometimes be very high," he said. "It's a coming together of the University community to talk about our lives together." Steinberg added that although many discussions are substantial, some are "very local and sometimes less important." University President Judith Rodin and Chodorow both said their previous universities did not have any organization similar to Council. "The closest to it was the Yale College Faculty meetings, but they didn't involve students and staff," Rodin said. "But I enjoy the meetings and am very impressed with the quality of discussion." Rodin said she sometimes finds such meetings frustrating. "There are moments I feel uneasy because I wish we had a better response or had done something that was able to solve a problem," she said. Besides its monthly meetings, Council also has 14 committees whose members and activities are approved by Council. These committees focus on topics including student life, The Book Store, financial aid, facilities and community relations. "[Council] provides informative reports on issues that are being addressed by its committees and they are held accountable at the forum when they present information to Council," Goodman said. "They also provide a structure for people directly in charge of areas of the University to hear that feedback." Goodman said people who serve as committee members become "active when they would never otherwise be active." But she added that the committee structure, in which some committees overlap, also shows some of the weaknesses in Council. Although Goodman refused to give an example of this problem, she said the Committee on Committees within the Council has to "be very careful when constituting committees and looking at their charges." Harris said the committees could "coordinate their work a little bit better" but added that they are a very important part of Council. "They are more representative than other committees," he said. "The committees may have a more diverse membership and can be more representative and more thoughtful than if one constituency -- administrators or the faculty -- just appointed them," he said. Goodman said the connection between the committees and the full body needs improvement. "I think we need to work harder at assuring that the agendas committees address and the results are known by the full community," she added. "More feedback is needed and the Council has a responsibility to ensure that the rest of the community is privy to that as well." Another issue both Harris and Goodman addressed was attendance. Harris said more Council members should attend each meeting. "I don't think the attendance is good enough," he said, "People show up when they think there's a crisis." But Goodman said outside attendance is a problem, adding that she wishes more members of the University community would attend.