Over the River, Through the Review

We are privileged to attend Harvard at a time of great transition. Between the curricular review and Allston planning, this year holds more potential for broad change, both positive and negative, than any year since the Undergraduate Council was founded in 1982. Harvard may never again have the opportunity to expand its campus as it does now, and the curriculum will not be dramatically overhauled again for at least a couple of decades. This year a number of momentous decisions will be made—with or without the active participation of the student body—and I expect the council to get students excited about the questions being posed and the problems being evaluated.

Setting aside content for a moment, the reality is that no matter what decisions are made, Harvard cannot change for the better unless students “buy-in.” Left to their own devices, the administration and faculty will probably come up with an acceptable alternative to the Core (it would be hard to dream up anything less successful). However, unless students both contribute to that decision and agree with the rationale behind it, the new general education requirement (the current proposed successor to the Core) will become unpopular long before the next review. We can tinker with academic, extracurricular and social structures at Harvard all we want, but without engaging students and focusing on their experience and culture it will be for naught.

Still, greater awareness and dialogue mean little if we do not also have a sense of urgency about the very tangible things at stake this year. To give you a sense of what I’m talking about, imagine these potential outcomes: first-years are assigned to upper-class houses when they arrive on campus, concentration choice moves back to sophomore year, student representatives sit on the Administrative Board, Houses are built on the other side of the river, international study becomes a requirement and a student center is built. None of these ideas are sure to happen and none of them are clear-cut in their upsides and downsides, but decisions regarding each of them will certainly happen in the coming year. If there has ever been a year to discuss the issues facing our community and make student opinion relevant to the decision-making process, this is undoubtedly the year.

But, to complicate matters, this is sure to be a challenging year for the council in its own right. Now buttressed by the termbill fee increase students approved last spring, the council is expected to deliver a number of tangible goods. If all goes well, we will give more than two hundred thousand dollars to student groups and House Committees. We will hold more large-scale concerts and entertainment acts, drawing bigger audiences than ever before. We will expand the smaller events, such as Movie Nights, and services that make for a vibrant and convenient campus. In short, we will have quite a successful year if we can convert greater financial resources into a Harvard that students are excited to call home.

Yet despite all of this activity, I want to return to the primacy of the curricular review, Allston and the other policy issues on the table. Advocacy work is inherently difficult because the council has a limited arsenal of effective bargaining tools, the process is slow and cumbersome and many students take little interest in the issues. These challenges must not dissuade us, however; we have to remember that even those issues that do not immediately have an impact on campus will have ongoing ramifications for years to come. Individually, we only spend four years at Harvard—and for a quarter of us, this is our final year—but we should nonetheless be committed to leaving a better community than the one we joined as first-years. After all, if former students had never cared about future classes, shopping period would not exist and our parties would still be shut down at 1 a.m.

How then, can the council deliver on students’ higher expectations for social events, student services and grants, while stepping up its advocacy role in what is a crucial year for both the council and the College? I am convinced that the council must reconfigure its relationship to the campus at large, making itself more efficient and more relevant to students’ lives. In other words, we need to close the actual and the perceived gap between the council and the student body. We’re off to a good start with last week’s council election, which had the highest voter turnout ever, but that is only a start.

This year, the council needs to increase the number of people involved in its operations, improve its channels of communication and be innovative in its efforts to mobilize students on particular issues. Events and services require a great deal of labor, which is why I plan to experiment with an “Event Staff,” managed by the vice president, which would include more people in the council’s work without adding bureaucracy to our committee structure or general meetings. To reach out to the student body, I will push the council to send physical mailings to students, table in dining halls, go door-to-door on a regular basis, start a major drive to put students on our “UC Announce” email list and seek partnerships with student groups that have a stake in the social and advocacy issues we are working on. But communication without mobilization is a waste of our time, which is why we will also employ town hall meetings, petitions, rallies and a “student platform” to elevate student participation in important College issues to a level at which it cannot be ignored.

At the end of the day, the council relies on students to be proactive members of our community. I pledge to press the council to open up more social, financial and advocacy opportunities than ever before, and I hope that students will respond by attending new events, applying for grants, educating themselves on the issues and responding to calls for specific advocacy actions. Together, and only together, we can make Harvard live up to its full potential.

Matthew W. Mahan ’05 is a social studies concentrator living in Kirkland House. He is president of the Undergraduate Council.