UC Slates Curricular Review Meeting

The Undergraduate Council (UC) will hold an “emergency student convention” tomorrow to push forward the curricular review, as resignations by top administrators threaten to sidetrack the review process.

The forum will take place tomorrow from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in the Kirkland Junior Common Room, on the same date that the full Faculty had been scheduled to meet for a vote of no confidence in University President Lawrence H. Summers’ leadership.

That meeting was cancelled following Summers’ resignation last week.

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby and Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 will both attend tomorrow’s forum, according to UC Student Affairs Committee Chair Ryan A. Petersen ’08.

Kirby and Gross play a key role in the review as co-chairs of a committee charged with overhauling the Core curriculum. But Kirby announced last month that he would step down from his post as Faculty dean at the end of this semester.

Kirby’s resignation came amid reports that his relationship with the University president was severely strained.

“It’s absolutely key for a better working relationship between the president and the Faculty that both keep the student body in mind,” Petersen said after last night’s UC meeting.

UC President John S. Haddock ’07 urged council members to publicize tomorrow’s event, stressing the importance of student involvement in the review process.

“If the review is going to succeed now, it needs students involved to engage that process,” Haddock said last night.

The Student Affairs Committee’s vice chair of undergraduate education, Matthew R. Greenfield ’08, said that tomorrow’s forum “will mark the very beginning of students reclaiming the curricular review.”

Greenfield said he hopes the forum will be the “biggest show of support for a revolution in undergraduate education that this University has ever seen.”

At last night’s meeting, the UC also passed legislation calling for undergraduate students to have a “formal and significant” role in choosing Summers’ successor.

Haddock said that the “search for a new president should be of great concern to undergraduates at the College.” The goal of the legislation is “to make sure that students have a legitimate and clear voice in the selection of a new president,” Haddock said.

The majority of last night’s meeting was devoted to a Powerpoint presentation on social programming by the council’s vice president, Annie R. Riley ’07, and Campus Life Fellow Justin H. Haan ’05.

Riley and her running-mate Haddock campaigned on a platform promising to shift social programming responsibilities from the UC to an independent student committee.

Riley said last night that social programming reform possesses the “potential to have a strong and lasting impact on the Harvard community for a very long time.”

In other UC business, the council passed a resolution to support the distribution of first-aid kits to freshmen.

The sponsors of that resolution said they focused on freshmen because upperclassman Houses already have medical kits in their superintendents’ offices.

—Staff writer Rachel L. Pollack can be reached at rpollack@fas.harvard.edu.