Bring the Shuttles Back

Looking to get to Logan Airport tomorrow? You’ll have one less option than last year. For the past 15 years, the Undergraduate Council (UC) has provided airport shuttles for Thanksgiving, winter, and spring breaks for $5 per person. Last spring, the Campus Life Committee (CLC), which organized shuttles and a few other student services, was eliminated to create a more streamlined, efficient UC. This decision resulted in the elimination of airport shuttles this school year. We fully supported cutting CLC, but now the UC needs to find a new way to provide a few valuable student services, including airport shuttles. As we argued in May when the CLC was cut, the UC should continue its services by outsourcing them to competent, willing student groups.

Airport shuttles have been popular since they were first offered in 1991. But the UC has never been exceptionally good at organizing them. Complaints of late, absent, and overbooked shuttles have been accumulating for 10 years. Last winter, in a particularly bad case of mismanagement, the UC had to deny spots to ticket-holding students because there was not enough space on the buses, leaving many students rushing to make their flights.

The UC should not be blamed for trying to provide student services such as Logan shuttles. However, it should realize (as it did when it cut CLC) that it is not the body that should be operating them. As the elected student government, the UC is in a unique position to facilitate—but not directly provide—a variety of campus-wide student services. Students appreciate having shuttles to the airport, inexpensive cardboard boxes for move-out, and $1 movie nights—all of which the UC used to provide. The UC is a single, central body with both the authority and financial means to coordinate these endeavors, and so the responsibility to do so falls on it. The UC’s role, however, should be to find entrepreneurial students and, when necessary, subsidize the projects rather than to do them itself. UC members are elected to be legislators, not business experts, and they should leave the logistical details to students who are more competent in organizing services.

The new UC leadership needs to implement a mechanism for arranging student services within the UC’s current two-committee framework. It does not need to bring back the CLC, nor does it need another third arm such as an "Outreach and Services Committee"—an idea which was proposed and rejected last spring. We do not know precisely how the UC ought to handle soliciting and selecting bids from third parties. It could be done by the UC’s Finance Committee (FiCom), or by a FiCom subcommittee, or by the president and vice president themselves. It is up to the UC’s newly elected leaders, Ryan A. Petersen ’08 and Matthew L. Sundquist ’09, to determine how best to organize outsourcing, but it needs to do so soon. We hope that, come spring break, UC-funded (but outsourced) shuttles will once again be taking students to Logan.