CLC Starts Year With Open Meeting

After last year’s social events met with mixed success, the Campus Life Committee (CLC) is looking to reinvigorate its image, and it kicked off this campaign Wednesday night with an open meeting to discuss improving the CLC’s party planning for the coming year.

This type of meeting had never been done before.

“We wanted to open ourselves up,” said CLC Chair John F. Voith III ’07. “People are starting to realize there needs to be some sort of change.”

Change was the order of the hour when the meeting began. The general consensus among both the CLC members and the approximately 25 guests who attended was that the CLC—which is a sub-committee of the Undergraduate Council (UC)—had not sufficiently publicized its events.

There was some divergence, however, as to how publicity campaigns should be spearheaded in the future.

Sopen B. Shah ’08, social vice-chair of the CLC, said that the committee’s first priority should be making sure social events are successful, “then attach our name to it.”

Tessa C. Petrich ’07, a guest at the meeting, said that publicity needed to focus more on the enthusiasm of those promoting the event.

“You can’t have a couple of dance-team members handing out fliers,” she said, alluding to the publicity for last year’s Havana on the Harbor cruise.

Only 50 students bought tickets to the cruise, which had a published capacity of 375. The Springfest Afterparty was a flop too; only 150 guests attended the event, which was marred by inclement weather. This event cost the UC $16,000.

Instead, Petrich said, the CLC “needs people to promote parties who are as excited as possible, and it needs to make more of an effort than e-mails and posters.”

This suggestion brought up another issue tackled last year when a UC Reform Commission proposed instituting direct elections to each of the UC branches.

This would have changed the current system of elections to the UC, in which the representative with the most votes from each House or Yard chooses a committee on which to serve—either the Financial Committee, the Student Affairs Committee (SAC), or the CLC—followed by the second-place winner. As a result, the third-place winner cannot choose a committee, and is assigned to whichever has not been selected.

The proposal to elect representatives directly to the three branches was killed in an 18-13 vote in the UC.

As a result of these indirect elections, SAC member Sam Teller ’08, who is also a Crimson editor, pointed out at Wednesday’s meeting that “at least one-third, two-thirds of this committee doesn’t want to campaign and promote a party.”

CLC members said creating successful events was their top priority.

To do that, the CLC needs to send a new message, according to Petrich.

“Open up to the college community that you’re here to help them to put on events,” she said. “This year, we’re back, we’re new, and we’re actually trying.”

Voith said that part of this new message would be encouraging all students to contribute.

“I want to make sure our ideas really do excite the student body. Last year, some events didn’t excite when the ideas hit the streets,” said Voith. Now, “we want to revise it to make it a two-way street and have ideas come to us.”