25 Years Later, The UC Endures

If the best stories are indeed the ones that have twists and turns, then the history of the Undergraduate Council (UC) may be due for a prize.

Now in the 25th session since its 1982 founding, the only independent student governing body that any recent Harvard undergraduate can remember has been shaped by a trajectory of College governance that reaches all the way back to the campus protests of the sixties.

Stretching from this highly activist period of the campus’s history through two committee revisions and numerous iterations, right up to the present—when some of the key figures behind its development appear to be wondering if it might be time for a change—the evolution of the council represents an ongoing process in determining how students can best govern their own. That process may well continue for some time.

SOVIET PLANNING

In the back corner of the UC’s Hilles office space is a nondescript shelf with a motley collection of binders.

Stationed as they are beside an inflatable figure of a boxer, a couple of cardboard boxes, and some old posters of UC-sponsored events featuring Chris Rock and Adam Sandler, they hardly appear to be anything except another bit of refuse, a relic of a hasty move-in. But to the members of the UC, these binders are the archives, and—with the UC currently in its 25th session—some of them are verging on a quarter-of-a-century old.

But the story of the present-day UC is much older than that—beginning with the burst of activism surrounding the University’s perceived support of the United States military during the Vietnam War, most notably the presence of ROTC on campus. It was amidst the confusion and enmity so characteristic of the era that the student government—a body known as the Harvard Undergraduate Council (HUC)—crumbled, leaving the fate of student legislature largely to a committee led by historian Merle Fainsod, the then-director of the Harvard Library.

Convening in the same year that University Hall was overtaken and occupied by protesting students, the Fainsod committee led to the establishment of a new system of student government organized as a decentralized, “alphabet soup” conglomeration of acronym-tagged student-faculty committees that would remain in place for much of the seventies. Few students appear to have been enamored with their performance.

“[The Fainsod system] looked like it had been designed to be the least effective and least efficient student government possible,” says Alan Cooperman ’81, who reported on Harvard’s student government for The Crimson into the early eighties. In fact, if a jesting Cooperman is to be believed, it may have been that Fainsod’s feel for efficiency with regards to political institutions suffered as a result of his fidelity to his particular area of expertise: Soviet Russia.

Whether or not it did in fact advance beyond the effectiveness threshold of a planned economy, the Fainsod system—with its myriad dispersed committees—seems to have created confusion for students seeking a direct avenue to gather and voice a collective opinion. Looking for a more effective, centralized organ of student governance, undergraduates voted in 1978 to establish a 96-member body known as the Student Assembly. Though founded with optimism and ratified by student referendum, the Assembly never received official recognition from the University, nor did it receive any formal powers or funding. That the new body’s influence was accordingly hamstrung is relatively clear.

“The assembly,” Cooperman writes in a 1980 Crimson article, “has an unimpressive record of past accomplishments—from free toilet paper to a rock concert—contributing to the widespread perception that it is little more than a plaything for ‘gov jocks.’”

After four semesters of missed quorums and lightweight advocacy, the Assembly asked then-Dean of the College John B. Fox, Jr. ’59 to appoint a group of undergraduates and faculty to investigate the state of student governance at the College. Meeting 12 times in the 10 months following its foundation in May 1980, the Committee to Review College Governance—more commonly known as the Dowling committee, after Committee Chairman and Gund Professor of Neuroscience John E. Dowling ’57—issued its report in March of 1981. Among the recommendations was the creation of a centralized, representative, funded body for student government. The seed for the Undergraduate Council had been planted: the fruit that would follow is still in existence today.

TIME FOR CHANGE?

But despite this apparent longevity, the question for Fox, whose original enlistment of Dowling puts him at the beginning of the chronological chain that led to the UC, is whether so many years have slipped by merely because the body in question has been stripped of influence.

“At the moment the Undergraduate Council seems to be having a pretty long run and I think that is because it’s not being put in the position of actually participating in the decisions being made,” says Fox, who is still of the opinion that the Fainsod system, with its emphasis on student-faculty committees, afforded students the most direct opportunity for substantial input, while also putting them on the hook for failure.

“The UC as it now exists is pretty much independent of any of the faculty’s bodies...it doesn’t have the power anymore to play a definitive role in decision-making,” he says, “So it doesn’t get blamed for things the way some of the old student governments used to get blamed for things.”

For his part, Dowling is open to the notion of change. “I think [the UC] has been very effective some years—more effective than others—but with a new president coming in and a new dean it might be time after 25 years to look at the governance of the University, not just the UC.”

Responding to the changes spurred by the antagonism of the sixties and the ambitious demands for Corporation and Administrative Board representation that cropped up from some students on the Dowling committee in the early eighties, Fox appeared similarly confident that a time for change will eventually be in the offing.

“The starting place [for change in governance] has always been—from the student point of view—that the University doesn’t listen to students, so the starting point is always a degree of antagonism,” he says. “In [these] instances...it’s come around to finding a new formulation, but all these formulations have a particular half life, and it comes around and you have to it again.”

SLIPPERS AND LOAVES

To many on the Student Assembly in the early eighties, it felt natural that there would be change all along.

“The Student Assembly had problems,” says Joseph F. McDonough ’81, who served at various times both as the head of the Assembly and a member of the Dowling Committee. “I felt when I was president that it was basically transitional, and the people who founded the Student Assembly felt that it was a beginning and some kind of a transitional body.”

Still, until the Dowling Committee, there had been some question regarding precisely what the Assembly would be transitioning to, and—as McDonough notes—there were conservative elements on campus and even on the Committee itself that put the prospect of any real development in doubt. “They wanted to put on their slippers, get their pipes out, sit in front of the fire and talk about student government and not do anything,” he says.

Not that the be-slippered crowd failed to carry the day in some respects. By most accounts the students pushing for a new system of governance originally had designs on privileges—including representation on the Administrative Board of the University, representation on the Corporation, and participation in tenure decisions—that were more far-reaching than the ones that the Dowling report recommended. But in the end, an endorsement for the first-ever funded student government was considered to be progress enough.

“It was frustrating,” says Natasha P. Stowe ’82, known at the time as Natasha Pearl, who served on the Dowling Committee and guided the Student Assembly in its final semester of existence, in 1982. “But on the other hand we had a historical opportunity to change things and we all figured it was better to take three-quarters of a loaf rather than no loaf at all.”

The full Faculty would go on to vote its overwhelming support for the Dowling report in May of 1981, with only one of its number siding with the negative. Given that the Student Assembly had never had anything more than “provisional recognition,” the step was a large one.

“That was what was important—that the Undergraduate Council be recognized by the Faculty, that it have a Faculty vote and that it have legitimacy,” says Dowling in retrospect.

‘SOMETHING FRESH’

“Student politicos, get your resumes ready! The Undergraduate Council is all ready to go,” The Crimson announced on May 28, 1982. It had taken a full year from the time that the faculty voiced its support of the Dowling report for the same body to ratify the constitution for the new UC. Much of the fall of 1981 had been taken up with haggling and disagreements over minority representation on the new council. But after passing a student referendum in March, the conclusion was more or less foregone—the Faculty’s vote was nearly unanimous. The Undergraduate Council was official.

True to form, the Student Assembly had met to dissolve itself that spring, and failed to meet the attendance threshold necessary to conduct the official vote to disband. “The assembly had to be buried by telephone; the more dedicated representatives called the absentees to approve its extermination,” read The Crimson. The new UC, however, was created specifically to address areas where the old body had been lacking. It had official recognition, it had funding, it had the responsibility to disperse funds, and—with Fainsod’s old surfeit of committees having been reconstituted, cut down, or eliminated—it was meant to be efficient.

A further boon, says Michael G. Colantuono ’83—who was elected in October to be the chairman of the first session of the UC—was the sense of mission that the members of the new council felt.

“We understood that we were creating something fresh,” says Colantuono, who remembers taking steps to ensure that the UC wouldn’t stray to the realm of the irrelevant and the self-serving, despite the insinuations of The Crimson announcement of the previous spring. When Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III proposed a set of architectural adjustments that would have greatly enhanced the new council’s basement office space but drained thousands of dollars from their budget, Colantuono nixed the idea.

“It was a sort of a view that if we were viewed as a sort of irrelevant, self-serving, resume padding debating society, we wouldn’t be any good,” he says.

“We just took the basement in the form that it was in and threw some desks and couches in it.”

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The Undergraduate Council office of today has a similarly makeshift feel.

In order to enter, council representatives think little of laying on their backs in the hallway of the Student Organization Center at Hilles, sliding their arm through the space between the floor and the bottom of the locked office partition, and jimmying the door handle open with a lacrosse stick that rests propped up on the other side.

But the feel of the office isn’t the only area where the council has not marked much of a change. In many cases, the timbre of student demands seems to be an echo of years past. In an e-mail to the UC open list a few months ago, Vice President Matthew L. Sundquist ’09 briefly raised the issue of student influence on both the Administrative Board and the Board of Overseers—the group of alumni that complement the Corporation at the pinnacle of University governance.

“After 25 years, I think it is time tto look at how undergraduates influence the community,” says current UC President Ryan A. Petersen ’08. “We have lots of ideas, we have a stake in the community, and we want to positively influence it.”

Such positive influence does not always come easily, says Petersen.

“In the end what matters are the results for students,” he says. “Most of the time we can achieve the best results by working collaboratively; other times we have to use more confrontational tactics.”

In past years such confrontation has spelt change for student governance. And if the parallels of history are to be trusted, then perhaps further modifications are not far off.

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.