UC Votes To Adopt Six Reports As Platform

The Undergraduate Council (UC) solidified its stance on the Harvard College Curricular Review at its meeting yesterday, with a vote to adopt as its official platform reports it has compiled on six of the review’s initiatives.

The six reports, along with a critical paper on the progress of the Committee on General Education released in late April, complete the UC’s platform.

Student Affairs Committee (SAC) Chair Aaron D. Chadbourne ’06 said at the meeting that the reports—which have been in the making for a semester—were not meant to be “full-fledged recommendations,” but instead a way of keeping student concerns about the curricular review on the table.

“I think our reports have tried to represent issues that are most important to students, and those are the issues we tended to focus on,” Chadbourne said after the meeting.

The reports stressed three main areas of concern: the classroom experience, the capacity for flexibility in academic pursuits, and advising.

They also laid out a series of suggestions for improvement, including reducing class size, lowering academic requirements, and centralizing the advising system.

The UC’s recommendations coincided in several points with the official reports released to the faculty yesterday by five of the College’s Curricular Review committees.

UC President Matthew J. Glazer ’06 said that the similarities reflect SAC’s close relationship with student representatives on each of the College’s committees.

“Some of the aspects do agree with the reports of the committees, but that could be a good thing,” Glazer said after the meeting.

Glazer said that the platform as a whole will be publicized widely in the fall and distributed to freshmen as well as posted on a website that the UC has created specifically for curricular review outreach.

Glazer said the faculty and administrators he has talked to so far who have read the UC’s report on the Committee on General Education are interested in hearing the rest of the UC’s platform.

After the UC released its first report, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby said that he encouraged the UC’s involvement, but thought that criticism of the committees’ findings was premature.

“I’m delighted to have people engaged in educational debate no matter what their criticism,” Kirby said. “I wouldn’t spend an enormous amount of time criticizing a report as if it were set in stone.”

During the meeting, the UC decided to separate two of the more controversial reports—on a January Term and concentrations—from the platform and vote separately on them.

After debate, the UC passed a report that endorsed a January term on the condition that it is crafted “carefully,” including a provision for financial aid so that all students may participate equally in international experiences.

Yesterday’s meeting did not address the controversial bill to provide for direct elections that has provoked a heated debate on the UC’s open list and even drew a guest speaker at the beginning of the meeting.

Direct elections would allow candidates to run for one of three of the UC’s committees, instead of the UC as a whole. Though the motion to reconsider the failed bill was hotly contested, it did not to garner the two-thirds vote necessary to pass.

Ryan A. Petersen ’08, one of the major proponents of the failed bill, said that he would be collecting signatures in order to send the bill to a student referendum in the fall if the UC failed to pass it in today’s meeting. He must collect 640 signatures of enrolled students to send the bill to a student referendum.

—Staff writer Liz C. Goodwin can be reached at goodwin@fas.harvard.edu.