Do You Hear The People Sing?

Today begins Harvard’s Faustian renaissance. The warranty’s out on this University’s newest administrative appliance at a crucial juncture in our history. On the cusp of an epic expansion, a new undergraduate curriculum, and massive administrative turnover, Harvard needs capable leadership now more than ever.

It is thus dumbfounding that the University’s Governing Boards would elect to the presidency a pants-wearing, child-bearing scholar of social history (read: history for weaklings) who doesn’t even hold a degree from Harvard. By entrusting our community to a scaredy-pants Bryn Mawr alumna, whose principal administrative experience is as dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—the what?—the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers have jeopardized our collective future.

There is, however, an alternative, whose viability has become blissfully clear in the past week. Blessed with insight, experience, and a steadfast commitment to efficiency and democratic governance, Harvard’s administrative messiah comes replete with the self-confidence of Lawrence H. Summers, the verbosity of Derek C. Bok, and the grace-under-fire of Nathan M. Pusey ’28.

Drew G. Faust should use this afternoon’s installation ceremony to prove her fealty to this university once and for all, by resigning the presidency. Harvard’s trustees should waste no time in confirming her heir apparent: the Harvard Undergraduate Council (UC).

Any doubts as to the UC’s competence to hold Harvard’s highest office have surely been quashed this week, during its teapot-bound war of attrition with administrators over the UC’s almost-legal practice of paying for underage students’ booze with money funneled to its bank account by the College. UC leaders have seized the opportunity to prove their worth as mature, tactful participants in Harvard’s administrative structures, and have acquitted themselves flawlessly—it is doubtless only a matter of time before the College accedes to their eloquently, insistently stated demands.

Last week, the College’s positively Jacobin interim dean, David Pilbeam, let the axe fall on the UC’s weekly party grants, the nascent micro-finance of Harvard’s social life. Party grants have propelled the development of a quasi-fetal social scene among the world’s most socially underprivileged animals—Harvard students—and our vital interests as students are wrapped up in their fate.

We undergraduates, described as “citizen-scholars” by the UC Executive Board its Oct. 3 memorandum to Dean Pilbeam, have a right to be consulted before any decisions are made that affect our lives as students, particularly those that limit access to our most vital resource: alcohol. University Hall’s pencil-necked paper-pushers exist to serve undergraduates, not to tell us how to behave.

By abrogating our right, as citizen-scholars, to participate in running the College, Pilbeam has signed his own death warrant as a Harvard administrator. Academics like Pilbeam, decades removed from their undergraduate years, cannot be trusted with the stewardship of citizen-scholars during their most important formative years. Such an antique administrator telling real, live undergraduates that they can’t use Harvard’s money to pay for other, underage, undergraduates’ alcohol is flabbergasting. “Perhaps this might be acceptable in other less principled societies, where membership does not require a commitment to logic and reason in the spirit of open inquiry,” the UC Executive posits in its memorandum. “In our University community the standard is higher; we demand decision through discussion, and finality through debate.”

Imagine, a Dean of the College with the temerity to take a decision without properly consulting his colleagues on the UC!

The arrogance and inhumanity of it alone is appalling, especially in the broad and frothy wake of the incorrigibly-unilateral Summers. This alarming trend among Harvard administrators must be nipped in the bud. The UC, being the very model of collegiality and non-competitive collaboration, would be a great improvement.

In a stinging indictment issued on Monday, Michael R. Ragalie ’09, chair of the UC’s Student Affairs Committee, exposed the profound malice with which “our colleagues in the administration” have quested after power in its relationship with the UC. “I have no doubt that the administration will go to any length, will press any advantage, and will commit any crime to assert its domination over the Council,” Ragalie proclaimed. “It has already committed the worst crime of all: it has rejected truth in claiming to protect it.” If that isn’t the kind of well-reasoned rhetoric that we ought to demand from our administrators, then I don’t know what is.

University administrators, by their nature, prevent us—citizen-scholars that we are—from acting on our god-given right to rule this College. After decades of our parents’ telling us that we are, indeed, god’s gift to the world, a pack of dithering deans has the audacity to question our judgement. Surely, comrades, University Hall’s malignant bureaucrats have proved to be nothing but a hindrance.

As she formally assumes the presidency, Faust must recognize that the prerogatives of her office extend only so far as her undergraduate peers permit. Earlier this week, UC Vice-President Matthew L. Sundquist ’09 began to circulate detailed plans from the 2001 student occupation of Massachusetts Hall, and today it’s nearly impossible to enter University Hall without a passport. The scent of revolution is in the air. Pilbeam, at least, is a graduate of Cambridge University; a Bryn Mawr alumna like Faust must be doubly careful to stay in our good books. We are, after all, the 6,500 smartest citizen-scholars on earth.

In the event that Faust does not bow out gracefully this afternoon, she would do well to heed our stern command, articulated best in Ragalie’s Monday missive: “The slightest whiff of incompetence, the first blossom of injustice drives us back to the barricades.” This, President Faust, is the music of a people who will not be slaves again.



Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.