The Silent Treatment

HUMILITY HAS NEVER BEEN a big selling point for Harvard's student government types. Last spring, as the now-defunct Student Assembly disintegrated, several of Harvard's vestigial student leaders continued to pontificate weekly before a sea of empty seats and a smattering of volunteer representatives. Last week, only one of the six losers in the race for the Undergraduate Council chairmanship managed to swallow his pride and seek a lower office. (He lost again.)

Amid the tradition of pomp and bluster, Peter N. Smith '83 has his work cut out for him. Smith is student government's soft-spoken, almost nondescript treasurer; it's hardly a glorious spot. But as keeper of the student government's first-eve $58,000 budget, the placid rookie to campus politics will undoubtedly become one of Harvard's better known student leaders, if not one of the most controversial.

The council's handsome war chest promises to be an object of repeated dispute this term as individuals and groups get their first crack at the spoils collected from $10 term-bill fees. And Smith's responsibilities include chairing the Grants Committee--which will recommend how the council should distribute these coveted funds.

Careful, sometimes halting in speech, Smith approaches the job with a quietness that defies its potential explosiveness. Before his election, a council member asked Smith whether his other role as financial manager of Harvard Glee Club's $30,000 budget would conflict with his treasurer duties. Smith assured the government that the Glee Club would not receive funding, but he earnestly added that his other responsibilities would not stop taking up a decided amount of his time.

Apparently impressed with his experience and modesty, the council elected Smith, who had stumbled into involvement with student government almost as unassumingly in the first place. When the student group drafting the constitution for the new government recruited participants from each House last year, announcements in Adams House newsletters had failed to attract a single interested participant before Smith volunteered at a House committee meeting. He wound up personally drafting the constitution's guidelines for funding, which he now finds himself following.

The hollow tradition of student leadership makes ascents like Smith's unremarkable. The most comic example of the rapid creation of a student leader occurred last spring, when a sophomore collected about 100 signatures at a couple of meals from students objecting to the campus-wide referendum on the constitution, saying it was poorly publicized and potentially misleading. This one-man, several-hour crusade vaulted the fellow behind closed doors before the Faculty Council, where he was asked to argue for the Faculty's disapproval of the referendum results on behalf of disgruntled students.

But Smith improves on this tradition of unsought and unexpected prominence by appearing actively averse to the grandstanding the council has afforded him "I'd like to think that I'd be able to live with whatever the council decides on any question," says Smith. He means to discuss all financial questions with the 89-member group, including some innovative ideas--such as avoiding any blanket restriction on what activities to fund, and possibly depositing the council's budget in a bank where it can earn interest.

Smith may lack decisiveness. At a meeting between the council officers this week, he fumbled on a recommendation over prices and values of answering machines, despite extensive research he had completed. But Smith more than balances any such tendency, by showing no evidence of the theatrics and belligerence which has doused many Harvard student government meetings and had plenty to do with the failure of the Student Assembly.

Smith is ready and willing to focus on the numbers and fully aware of their contentious nature. Fortunately, he seems oblivious to the spotlight focused upon him.