Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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Goverr Faculty Student BY MARION ELLIOTT News Editor A proposal calling for a University Council with equal representation for students, faculty and administration as a governing body of USC now ap pears to have no hopes of being passed in the near future. The University faculty rejected University Governance, as the proposal is called, at a meeting of the general faculty at the end of the spring semester. Such a proposal would have to be approved by the general faculty, the Student Senate and the Board of Trustees. Under the proposed University governance a University Council with broad areas of power would be formed. Such a council consisting of equal representation from the student body, faculty and ad ministration would be able to override a veto by the University President with a three-fourths II' Sign up fo (Aug. 28-3 tance-Pi Rejects Proposal majority. A Board of Trustees veto could not be overridden. The proposal was drawn up by an ad hoc committee composed of student, faculty and ad ministration representatives originally commissioned in 1973 by former USC President Thomas F. Jones. At that time SGA President Rita McKinney predicted the plan would go into effect before the 1974 student elections saying, "This is the only way the students will have a direct say in the decision-making process of the University." However, the proposal took longer to prepare than McKinney allowed and a Faculty Senate committee which studied the proposal made its recom mendations to the faculty just this past April. Since the proposal would involve constitutional changes it had to go before the whole University *E U THE VE REGAR r your free yearbook poi 19) or at the Russell Hou an Fac( faculty. The faculty rejected the proposal upon the recom mendation of the Faculty Advisory Committee. In its report to the faculty that committee said, "It is the unanimous view of this com mittee that the structure en visioned therein (the proposal) is based on a conception of the University which is unacceptable in principle." The report later says the University faculty and ad ministration each have certain University business which they should have authority over. The academic program should be controlled by the faculty, the report says, since they are knowledgeable in "disciplined inquiry" and know best how to direct the work of students into fruitful paths. Meanwhile, the orderly process of daily business should be carried out by the University ad ministration, the report says. In some matters authoritative powers are exercised jointly by the faculty and administration, however, it is not acceptable to establish a simple equality of authority be hilT ICTIURE D LES.S. -trait at the student activ se patio (Sept 2.A i fr.om S Grim. tween these two permanent but distinct segments of the Univer sity, the report says. "The student body," the report says, "is in the position of effective equality neither with the faculty, which is responsible for its training, nor with the ad ministration, which is responsible for maintaining orderly procedures." When students enroll in the University they accept the disciplines which the faculty and administration have established to provide them, according to the study. "To propose that students, whose role in the University is by nature only temporary and who are not or not yet-fully involved in the academic profession should have an equal voice with the faculty and administration in shaping the life of the University neglects both capabilities and their real in terests, which lie mostly outside the University in the professional world," the report says. The vote of the faculty to reject the proposal was nearly unanimous, according to Dr. Rufus Fellers, chairman of the Faculty ities fair Future Advisory Committee. The vote was a voice vote and thus no exact count was recorded. "The members of the Faculty Advisory Committee and apparently the general faculty don't think that the proposed plan is the right way to run a University," Fellers said. "There exists a lot of room for various parts of the student community to have more to do with managing its own affairs. I would first advise them to take ad vantage of the responsibilities they now have before asking for more," Fellers said. Student represen tatives to certain committees of the University have shown very poor attendance slates for the past couple of years, according to Fellers. Furthermore, the proposal has never been considered by the Student Senate which has never acted on it, Fellers said. "That clearly means that they have no interests in it." Steve Brown, SGA attorney general and chairman of the committee that composed the University governance proposal, disagreed with Fellers assessment. "We were com missioned by former President Jones to send a report to the Faculty Senate. That was our mission. If they had accepted it, the proposal would have gone directly to the Student Senate. "We had gotten votes of confidence from the Senate all along and I can assure you we would have had no problems with it passing there," Brown said. As far as student representatives' attendance at committee meetings, they are no worse than faculty attendance, Brown said. Both Brown and SGA President Steve Hill said they were surprised that the faculty rejected the whole proposal. "We didn't expect the proposal to go through com pletely," Brown said, "and we were willing to compromise. This was just supposed to be a start. We emphasized in the report that we didn't consider it to be in final form. We put in about 80 hours of work each on this and they refused to even look at it with an open mind." The report to the general faculty said that students have only a limited time here, Brown said, "but I think the time students spend here is very important and we have no way to effectively express our views on expansion or anything of the University. The whole project started out under Jones on an optimistic note and all of our work is now thrown out without their giving any specifics." "Our next move," SGA President Steve Hill said, "will probably be to generate student interest and talk to influential people in the Faculty Senate who rnay go to bat for us later. We may also talk to the President and :liscuss some changes in the proposal." "Students give input now, but ur major objection is that we only give as much as the administratiorn grants us," Hill said. "Students are totally at the discretion of the administration and we really have 1o executive power other than the obby," he said addinig, "We want Nqual representation to protect students' rights." Referring to a passage in the ~ommittee's report that say~s ~tudents are transient and should ollow rules of the administration luring their tenure here. Hill said. 'It sounds like they are saying the aculty are here forever and smne Please Turn to PaKe 304A