Re: Yale Course of Study Committee. I was never deeply interested in the details of the committee; I just had a crush on one of its members. I believe the students were voting members of the committee. There were only three of them, so even if they voted in a bloc – which would have been rare on any issue in contention – they would need substantial support from faculty/administration to determine the outcome. And the committee didn’t have ukase. It could block proposals, but all it could do positively was to send the matter to the faculty.
As a practical matter, if there was something the administration wanted, it would not have had trouble getting it through the committee over student objections unless it was something really radical (like maybe a business major). Also, in style, Yale – both back then and, I think, still – had a pretty strong culture of respect between the faculty and the undergraduate students. There were a lot of structures that created ties between individual faculty or administrators and students – faculty were associated with residential colleges and often showed up there, everyone always had a faculty advisor, and there were all sorts of back-channel lines of communication through the senior societies or institutions like the Elizabethan Club. There was not a lot of Us vs. Them at all.
@JBStillFlying I am really puzzled by your association of the word “Studies” with pre-professionalism. I associate it with a near utter lack of practicality, since it usually indicates a bunch of disparate methodologies directed at a somewhat diffuse object of study defined geographically – East Asian Studies, African Studies – or by identity politics – Women’s Studies, African-American Studies. There’s nothing pre-professional about it.