Students Challenge Cuts

Undergraduate student leaders met Friday to discuss a joint reaction to the sweeping budget cuts announced last Monday by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The group agreed on a three-phase protest dubbed “We Are Harvard: Students, Staff, and Faculty for Transparency and Inclusion in Budget Cuts,” which will take place before, during, and after the monthly Faculty meeting this Tuesday.

The administration is “still not being transparent,” said Andrea R. Flores ’10, Undergraduate Council president, at the meeting. Other than Flores, Institute of Politics President Mary K.B. Cox ’10, Harvard College Democrats Presidents Eva Z. Lam ’10, several UC members, and numerous House Committee chairs were in attendance.

In an e-mail to The Crimson, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith wrote that he did not understand the logic behind the protest, as the “open dialogue” students are calling for is already happening.

“We are openly and actively informing the community of the actions we’ve planned,” he wrote.

The protest will begin with student group leaders—and possibly faculty or staff—handing out materials before the meeting starts. Then students who serve on student-faculty committees, and are therefore allowed to attend the meeting, will pose questions to the Faculty about budget cuts, according to the plan.

At 5:15 p.m. the group plans to hold a larger rally outside University Hall, where the Faculty meeting will be in progress.

During the meeting, several students discussed methods to increase press coverage of the event to put more pressure on administrators.

“There are mainstream media outlets that care about this,” said UC representative Eric N. Hysen ’11, “Now I think that’s something we can leverage.”

“The best thing we can do is bring together students, staff, faculty, and alumni. If we can bring together all those forces, they will listen,” he said.

Several students in attendance seemed optimistic that members of the Faculty would take their side in the struggle to give student voice more sway in College budget decisions.

In an e-mail sent to the student body, Flores wrote that the budgetary decisions—to reduce shuttle service, close the Quad library, cut hot breakfast, increase section sizes, and slash House budgets—were the result of a “top-down” approach without input from those affected by them.

“Broad community input would have alerted the administration to the serious issues that have been raised by many of these cuts,” she wrote. “Going forward, we are concerned that this pattern will continue as future cuts are announced over the summer and into the fall, when student input will be even more limited than during these first round of cuts.”

A Facebook event listed as being hosted by “Harvard Students, Faculty, and Staff” has been created for the rally. HoCo chairs said they also plan to ask their House Masters to take part.

Flores, who said she had initially expected “primarily administrative cuts” to be announced last Monday, said before the meeting that the strong student reaction to the budget cuts is being met with little response from administrators.

“[Students] are realizing that no matter how many petitions they’re doing or e-mails they write... they’re not getting any sort of response,” she said. “Even though we’re the consumers of the education, we’re not able to give feedback.”

In his e-mail to The Crimson on which Flores and UC Vice President Kia McLeod ’10 were copied, Smith pointed to the town hall meetings, a web portal detailing the planned cuts, and group discussions administrators have held with students as examples of the administration’s effort to solicit student opinion.

“All of this seems to me to be very much in the spirit of the ‘open dialog’ the students say they are seeking,” he wrote.

Smith also wrote that students are involved in the working groups that have been established to address the looming deficit of $220 million—only $77 million of which would be addressed by the cuts announced last week. The May 11 budget cuts were announced before the College’s budget working groups had the their first meeting.

—Staff writer Eric P. Newcomer can be reached newcomer@fas.harvard.edu.