Reform? Who Cares?

. U.C. change is impossible without student interest.

I've been writing columns for all of two years now and I've yet to write about the Undergraduate Council.

People are starting to talk. What self-respecting Crimson editor could go most of his college career without taking a swing at the Gang That Can't Shoot Straight?

For those of you who are visitors to Cambridge, or for those students who have been hibernating, a quick summary is in order. the Gabay administration, which took office squeaky-clean, has gone through a veritable Cuisinart of political scandal this year. The gaffes have included unheeded student referenda, unfair elections, and faulty attendance-taking. Through it all, the council has handled itself with the grace of a two-legged s(tool).

The fumbling of the council has led concerned students (all three of them) to demand change, Change, CHANGE! University elders have even threatened to intervene to straighten the teetering student government. Suffice it to say that it's been an Excedrin year for the council.

Well, maybe I just like underdogs, but I'm again going to pass up the opportunity to bash the council. (at least for the whole column). Not that I doubt the veracity of the various reports on their total and utter incompetence; the dirt that has found its way into the press is, I'm sure, just the tip of the duncecap.

The council really is a mess. But the standard council-bashing misses an essential point. Without excusing Vice President Josh Liston '95 and his ilk, I suggest that the real villains are not those falsifying attendance records and rigging elections--the real villains are all around. They are us.

The woes of the council just reflect the inattention of the student body. When the voters in a democracy (however flawed it may be) simply don't care, council-style ugliness is the almost inevitable result.

And make no mistake about it, the students at Harvard don't care. Turnouts for elections rarely top 25 percent, less than half of the total the admittedly apathetic U.S. electorate achieves. the much-ballyhooed referendum on council reform (reported on incessantly in this paper) netted lower than 30 percent of the students.

With this back of interested voters, the council has become a club for the politically-inclined. The students with only a sincere desire to serve the community (rather than themselves) quickly flee once the graft and corruption comes into view. Those who are left have a field day honing their skills at weaseling and waffling.

An interested electorate would certainly not weed out all these would-be Slicks and Trickies, but it would keep a close eye on them, and it would reward those with a genuine interest in student welfare.

It's almost comical then, watching the earnest reformers go to work, tinkering as they do with bylaws and referenda, yet without that most vital and curative of all elements, public interest--it's like without wheels. There can be no serious reform until council issues pass the most fundamental of all tests--the "do-I-care" test.

I suspect that the student body will never pass that test; we're too busy with all the others. The council simply does not have the impact on students' lives needed to shove its way into minds crowded with grade worries, job hunts, relationships, and for those final club members, ever-present hangovers.

Until that magical day when students start caring, the reforms will just have to sit back and enjoy the show with the rest of us.

David L. Bosco '95 is Associate Editorial Chair of The Crimson