In recent weeks, the Ivy Council — a group of delegates from all undergraduate student governments at Ivy League colleges — has discussed a possible resolution backing affirmative action.
"We hope to pass a resolution at our spring conference at Princeton the weekend of April 4-6," Edward Pritchett — Yale sophomore and Ivy Council vice president for external affairs — said in an email.
The issue is of particular prominence recently because the Supreme Court will rule on two University of Michigan affirmative action cases this spring.
The Ivy Council makes public statements on "large-scale political issues," said Princeton delegate Bryan Hiscox '04, in an email. Delegations from the member schools vote on a final resolution derived from separate resolutions passed by the student councils at each school, Hiscox said.
All Ivy League student governments have been given a proposed resolution on affirmative action to consider, Pritchett said.
The student governments at Dartmouth College and the Univerisity of Pennsylvania passed declarations in agreement with the proposed resolution, Pritchett said. "No school has outright opposed this resolution thus far," he said.
No partisan stance
Pettus Randall '04, USG president, said the possible resolution "hasn't come up" in the USG.
"Our position this year [in the USG] is that we don't take partisan stands," Randall said. There may be discussion of whether to address the resolution at Sunday's USG Senate meeting, Randall said.
Pritchett said the council will try to adjust the resolution if any schools pass modified versions. "Each school was asked to make the resolution fit their school's ideology on this idea, and we would try our best to combine these different ideas under one for the spring conference resolution," he said. "Some schools are making more changes to the resolution so that it fits their school as well as it can."
Pritchett said all comments he has received from member schools have been positive.
The process
Resolutions in the Ivy Council are passed by a majority vote, Hiscox said. "Because the [council] is an organization that intends to accurately represent the Ivy League schools it does not pass resolutions that don't have wide backing," he said.
For this reason, potentially controversial resolutions are generally discussed at length before a resolution is drafted in the council, Hiscox wrote.
Hiscox said he did not expect the USG to consider the issue.
"I know many people wish the USG were more activist, while others are happy to stay as far away from addressing issues outside of campus as possible," he said.
The Ivy Council, which meets twice a year, passed a resolution at its fall conference at Cornell University. It was the council's "first resolution in about two years," which denounced the "Drug-Aid" provision in the Higher Education Act, Pritchett said.
Federal aid
The provision aimed to prevent high school and college students convicted of drug charges from receiving federal aid for college, he said.
Princeton's delegation was the only delegation to abstain from that vote, Hiscox said.
"As a delegation we decided to abstain because we did not have any sort of 'mandate' from the USG allowing us to support the resolution," he wrote.
The wording of the council's resolution made clear not all member schools had supported it, Hiscox said.
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