Students: Power to Participate

At countless U.S. colleges, angry students have threatened to disrupt their campuses in confrontations with administrators on the issue of student power. But not at the University of Pennsylvania, where the question is purely academic. In what President Gaylord P. Harnwell approvingly calls "a quiet revolution," carried out with neither malice nor militancy, students have been ushered into the corridors of power, and at Penn they now wield more control over their destinies than do their peers at other schools of its size (19,500).

The most effective shot in the revolution was a 42-page report issued in 1966 by a self-appointed Student Committee on Undergraduate Education. Based on questionnaires sent to 5,500 students, the report contained nearly 100 recommendations backed by arguments so well-reasoned that, says Dean of Women Alice Emerson, it "put the stamp of quality on undergraduate thinking." In response, Penn administrators approved such changes as allowing students to take one course a semester on a "pass or fail" basis, fashion their own individualized major and sit on curriculum committees.

The most visible evidence of student power is The University Forum, a group of 20 students and 20 teachers and administrators who meet monthly to discuss any issue they consider relevant. The Forum includes President Harnwell, four undergraduate college deans and other top officials, and provides a clear path through the normal bureaucratic thickets. Students will also help choose new deans for men, women and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Student Courts. While coed dormitory hours and visiting rights in men's dorms still stir violent arguments on many campuses, Penn has assigned all such decisions to a ten-student, ten-teacher committee. This group recently extended women's curfews to 1:30 a.m. on weekdays and 2:15 a.m. on weekends, gave men the right to entertain girls in their rooms until 2 a.m. on weekends. Infractions of undergraduate regulations are handled by separate men's and women's courts composed of students. There is also a student-run traffic court and a student board that en forces the campus honor code.

The campus courts are so firmly established that when a faculty committee tried to discipline eleven students accused of interfering with Dow Chemical recruiters last November, the student outcry persuaded the university to hand the cases back to the student judiciary. As a result, the university created a special commission to draft policy on demonstrations; typically, it includes six student members.

Even before the latest gains, Penn students had acquired two instruments of self-expression that are fast becoming commonplace: they annually issue hardhitting critiques of courses and their professors, and they initiated a "free university" to take non-credit courses of their own choosing.