Word: referendum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...surface, the coalition of Popular Republicans (MRP), Communists and Socialists could put over the new constitution in next Sunday's referendum by a thumping majority. Between them, these parties had polled 14,976,000 votes in the last election, as against 4,835,000 for the parties now opposing the constitution...
Last May, after a College-wide referendum, a committee of the Student Council voted to send Douglass Cator '46, then Editorial Chairman of the CRIMSON, as the Harvard (and New England) delegate to an International conference of students to be held in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Cater returned to Cambridge last week and has prepared a report to the student body on the results of the Conference. This is the first section of that report...
...afternoon and at every future session, for the Council has made this most important of its committees genuinely representative of Harvard undergraduates. In addition to having their views expressed this time by men from their Houses and extra-curricular groups, undergraduates may themselves vote on disputed issues. This revolutionary referendum technique, proposed by members of the investigating group to make certain that their work would not be discarded by a Council majority, may well presage the dawn of the long-awaited new day in Harvard student government...
...face value without realizing that this group unilaterally has assumed existence, power, and rules. If there are faults in the organization, if there are unhealthy areas within the structure of the Council, it is because the whole system has never been subjected to the test of open inspection and referendum. And until it has, the Council exists in a vacuum, operating as a debate society which has drawn up a pretty set of laws which bind no one beyond the narrow confines of its own membership...
...what authority does the current Council limit the right to referendum to those demon reformers who can collect 500 names on a petition? By what right does it limit the powers of proposing and ratifying amendments to its own membership? Merely because 17 members of a Student Council guessed that these provisos were equitable ten years ago? Even then they were not convinced. Reports claim that these back-room sessions were "smoke-filled and heated." But while the document lay on a table in Phillips Brooks House for thirty days, waiting for someone to raise an objection (which would have...