Earl McGrath, a U.S. Commissioner of Education, produced in 1970 a study that is just as relevant 30 years later. It is a clear and fair examination of the pros and cons of involving students in college and university governance.

The book extends its analysis through historical example and contemporary practice. McGrath concludes that students can and should play a large role in governance, but that the burden is so great that administrators need to promote and encourage such participation as an integral part of students' educational experience. Including students in governance must be a community endeavor, not an adversarial one.

McGrath shows convincingly, among many points I would like to quote, that "students whom faculty members consider sufficiently mature intellectually and morally to study understandingly such works as Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Aquinas' Summa Theologica, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth, Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Wundt's Volkerpsychologie, to say nothing of the demanding treatises in modern physics," can without much trouble "comprehend and deal with the theoretical issues and the practical problems of [merely] the academic establishment" (71).

An extensive survey of actual practice produces much cross-institutional data about real student involvement at every level of decision-making. One hopes that a survey in this generation might be done for the purpose of gauging how far we have come toward meeting McGrath's challenge.