Harvard Students: The UC Is Your Responsibility, Too

On Friday, voting in the midterm elections for the Undergraduate Council closed with eight students newly elected. Ultimately, 17 candidates ran for the contested seats, but not until after the UC had extended deadlines for declarations when the original submission deadline passed with a total of only two students having declared their candidacies. The only competitive elections were in Adams, Lowell and Pforzheimer. Though the story of this most recent election may not be representative of the total level of student interest in the UC, it is an occasion to consider what the Council’s role is at Harvard, and what the implications are of choosing to remain uninvolved in their decisions.

The UC has the power and the resources to act as a real liaison between the student population and the administration, but as the midterm elections have helped to demonstrate, many on this campus do not take that responsibility very seriously. It would, however, be in our best interest to pay more attention to what our student government does.

In recent weeks, Undergraduate Council leaders have successfully implemented a new spring break meal plan, with the College promising to provide more options in March for students who remain on campus, detailed further initiatives for spreading the “HeForShe” movement at Harvard, and piloted condom dispensers in every freshman dorm. Yet most people wouldn’t consider the work of the UC as something that requires their own personal involvement, as the lack of candidates for Friday’s election helps to illuminate.

Like Sam Clark and Gus Mayopoulos famously successful joke campaign in 2013,  this year’s elections featured some of the same humor in an attempt to garner greater student interest. But the unserious nature of these campaigns may signify a larger problem with the student government’s relationship with its constituents. Even council members are not optimistic: In November, Cabot House representative Jacob R. Steinberg-Otter ’16 said, “We’re never [going to] see the day where the UC is a fully relevant body at Harvard.”

Moreover, on a day-to-day basis, the specific work of the UC is not well known to most on this campus. As UC representative Phebe Hong explained in a Crimson op-ed, “the main issue is that many students simply don’t know what the UC does . . . this past semester, the UC brought table numbers back to Annenberg, piloted a CharlieCard and took stances on Q Guide difficulty scores, unwarranted video-monitoring, and smaller section sizes.” In addition, the Council is responsible for allocating a budget of $450,000, a sum to which we all contribute in our term-bills and which matters because it supports the organizations and initiatives that make a real difference in the quality of our time here at Harvard.

In short, the UC deserves our attention. If we are to become active and involved citizens of the world upon our graduation, it should start while we are still students, with our more consistent participation and attention to the doings of the people we have elected to represent our wishes.