Word: fainsod
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...Take, for example, the late 1960s, when administrators created a litany of committees to deal with Harvard students prone to occupying campus buildings. There was the Fainsod Committee, which examined Faculty protocols and which created the Committee of Fifteen to contemplate “changes in the governance of the University.” In turn, the Committee of Fifteen begat the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, to deal with incidents like the April 1969 riots that started all the trouble to begin with. And lest we forget the stillborn President’s Emergency Consultative Committee, which was declared...
...Convening in the same year that University Hall was overtaken and occupied by protesting students, the Fainsod committee led to the establishment of a new system of student government organized as a decentralized, “alphabet soup” conglomeration of acronym-tagged student-faculty committees that would remain in place for much of the seventies. Few students appear to have been enamored with their performance...
...Fainsod system] looked like it had been designed to be the least effective and least efficient student government possible,” says Alan Cooperman ’81, who reported on Harvard’s student government for The Crimson into the early eighties. In fact, if a jesting Cooperman is to be believed, it may have been that Fainsod’s feel for efficiency with regards to political institutions suffered as a result of his fidelity to his particular area of expertise: Soviet Russia...
...Whether or not it did in fact advance beyond the effectiveness threshold of a planned economy, the Fainsod system—with its myriad dispersed committees—seems to have created confusion for students seeking a direct avenue to gather and voice a collective opinion. Looking for a more effective, centralized organ of student governance, undergraduates voted in 1978 to establish a 96-member body known as the Student Assembly. Though founded with optimism and ratified by student referendum, the Assembly never received official recognition from the University, nor did it receive any formal powers or funding. That...
...moment the Undergraduate Council seems to be having a pretty long run and I think that is because it’s not being put in the position of actually participating in the decisions being made,” says Fox, who is still of the opinion that the Fainsod system, with its emphasis on student-faculty committees, afforded students the most direct opportunity for substantial input, while also putting them on the hook for failure...