I Believe in a Better Harvard

At some point during our first semester at Harvard—usually when the temperature drops and the greenery disappears—we realize that this imposing institution is not merely an extension of the academic experience, but also our new home. This is where we eat and sleep, learn and socialize, fail and succeed and build life-changing relationships.

Our experience over these important years is inseparable from the campus surrounding us—a campus for which we all too often disavow responsibility. This is why, when you go to vote in the Undergraduate Council’s Student Activities Fee referendum this week, I ask you to vote “yes” on both questions and invest in our home, for our benefit and that of future classes.

Initially, I found it tempting to avoid this issue in my term as council president. Not only do I dislike proposing additional costs for students, but this is hardly a friend-winner or legacy-builder—especially when this council has delivered on party hours, keycard access, concerts, movie nights and other initiatives that ask very little of students. But in reality, I, and the vast majority of the council, publicly support this increase because we think it is wrong to pass the buck to future students when it is abundantly clear that we can no longer meet the demand for council grants, social events, student services and advocacy efforts.

Once we realized that we were struggling to respond to student group grant requests and complaints about social life, we began looking at our peer institutions and realized that our student activities fee is far lower than those at other schools. While every college structures its activities fee differently, in each case most of the money is disbursed by students for student groups, social life and services. Boston University (BU), for example, has a mandatory $414 yearly fee with $128 devoted to student groups and $82 to campus events. So even though BU’s fee covers a broader range of services than ours, we still earmark less than a sixth of what they do for student groups and events.

Although Harvard’s fee is currently $35, my predecessor’s administration set the council budget at $47 per student as it attempted to keep pace with demand by spending past rollover. The reality is that while the campus has become accustomed to consuming council grants, events, and services at $47 per student, the next fiscal budget will have to return to the $35 per student level, meaning smaller grants and fewer events and services. This decline would be less serious if the reality were not that other top campuses are already easily spending a few times as much as Harvard on the same needs.

So what would the council actually do with more money?

First, the increase from $35 to $75 is only $28 in real terms—$12 would go to keeping our budget at its current level. Second, the council would be constitutionally mandated to earmark two-thirds of all funds for student group grants, meaning that roughly $19 out of the remaining $28 would be used to move us closer to meeting student groups’ actual needs. Finally, the last $9 would go to improving the quality of established events, such as more movie nights or better and cheaper concerts, and funding new initiatives, such as class-wide barbeques, a comedian event or club nights.

The council has a good idea of what students want because students vote with their feet. Shuttles, $1 Movie Nights, UC Boxes, concerts and Loker Nights all consistently sell out, while less successful ventures—the UCard for example—have been abandoned. The council also recognizes that there is a huge unmet demand for student group funding. This year we have received nearly 1,000 grant requests. While we have been able to adequately fund many grant requests under $250, larger requests generally receive only a fraction of the funding needed. For example, grant requests ranging from $750 to $1000 have received only 40 percent funding on average. According to an analysis by Finance Committee chair Teo P. Nicolais ’06, the proposed increase would allow us to fund 90 percent of need for requests up to $750, and 70 percent of need for requests up to $2000.

The council is equipped to handle this increase. The Finance Committee has dramatically decreased turn-around time on grants and has established a reconciliation board to prevent abuses. The Campus Life Committee, benefiting from collaboration with the Concert Commission and the First-Year Social Committee, has overseen a record number of successful events this year, and has the capacity to do more.

Finally, if the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) makes the activities fee mandatory, it will become part of tuition and therefore part of the “cost of attendance” in the Financial Aid Office’s calculation—the mandatory fee would be eligible for tuition aid.  As long as the fee remains opt-out, it is not specifically taken into account when setting aid packages. If FAS decides to delay aid coverage for a mandatory fee, I will personally lobby to delay the switch to mandatory until such coverage is secured.

We can take pride in our campus, or we can sit around and decry “government inefficiency.” We can take responsibility, or we can complain about campus life while student group funding falls. I hope we step up, and commit ourselves to our home, because no one can do that for us.

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