Council's Effort to Help Burma Not in Vain

To the editors:

Who would have thought that my time on the Undergraduate Council would have left such a legacy? I am amazed to find the council’s Burma activity of yesteryear, for which I proudly take full credit, continually dredged up as an example of its past irrelevance and ineffectiveness, even six years later (Editorial, “A Step in the Wrong Direction,” Feb. 7).

Why did I waste my time on these measures instead of providing services to Harvard students? Basically, because Harvard students are, by and large, spoiled and overprivileged, are not in need of a parliamentary body to plan dances and concerts, and because there are more important things in the world. In fact, the council’s work on Burma was some of its most effective: due in large part to the council’s pressure on Harvard University Dining Services not to sign an exclusive contract with PepsiCo, that company pulled out of Burma in 1996— a major victory in the free Burma movement. I know this pales in comparison to, say, providing concerts on-campus, but some of us reactionaries still believe that the private sector, rather than government, should be responsible for entertainment.

Finally, it’s worth noting that while Burma activism took up a good deal of my time, it took up very little of the council’s time, and the council was actually far more responsive and active in 1995-1997 than it had been in years past—I am pleased to see that universal keycard access, an issue on which I worked with some success in 1995-1996, is still progressing. What the council realized during those years, however, was that it doesn’t take much time or resources to “take a stand.” And if the council’s status as the student government of the most prestigious and widely recognized university in the world might help a struggle outside Harvard, why not take a few minutes to take a stand?

Marco B. Simons ’97

March 13, 2002

The writer is a former chair of the Student Affairs Committe of the U.C. and founder and former chair of the Harvard Burma Action Group.