Word: coh
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Harvard's conventional wisdom says that power over undergraduates' social affairs is vested in the COH. This is about 90 per cent patent untruth, though it is probably to the advantage of the administration to allow such a false impression to continue. Discontented students will waste all their time trying to deal with the antiquated Committee. In fact, the COH has a great deal of power only by comparison to the absolute impotency of student groups, like...
What, exactly, has the COH done in the last four or five years? It has discussed changing the method of assigning freshmen to Houses, increasing parietals, and student seating on faculty committees -- bird seed compared to questions like coeducation and a more relevant House system. The latter issues are the type which do indeed decide the social make-up of Harvard, and on these the COH has no power whatsoever. It has no control over social policy-setting matters; it merely oversees specific problems that arise. And even for these small problems, the Committee usually bows to the will...
Consider the House assignment debate; the Masters talked for four years about the problem and couldn't come up with a solution. Finally, they turned it over to Dean Ford and asked him to make a decision. This shows the structural limitation inherent in the COH. The Masters feel fierce competition among thesemlves as representatives of the different Houses. They evaluate each proposed social reform in terms of how it will affect their own House's "prestige" or "position" vis-a-vis the other Houses. Since each proposal which comes before the Committee is bound to "lower" some Houses...
...think of any issue this goddamned commtitee ever did solve," said Master Crooks, who has been a COH member since the House assignment debates of five years ago. He added, "A vote has never decided anything on this committee. We always end up turning everything over to Dean Ford, saying 'We can't decide,' and he ends up making the decisions...
This structural limitation explains why the COH deals with small problems rather than policy decisions. When a decision-making body can't even reach a consensus on the few issues thrust upon it by the rapidly changing outside world, the question of the ability of that body to initiate meaningful farsighted reform becomes irrelevant. The city of Cambridge would have to enter the Twilight Zone before the COH as presently constructed would ever initiate any of the social reforms so obviously desired at Harvard College...