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To the Editors of The Crimson:

According to an article in Wednesday's Crimson, the Undergraduate Council's proposed Grateful Dead concert now has financial backing and requires only the approval of the administration. I urge the Undergraduate Council to reconsider the concert and to forget the whole idea. If the Council does not come to its senses, I hope that Dean Epps will veto the proposal. There are two major problems with the concert proposal.

First of all, one must consider the purpose of the Council. The Council was established as an organization to benefit the undergraduate community, not as a profit-making body. Each student contributes ten dollars toward the Council's budget. Last year, the Council had money left over at the end of its term. Why then are they sponsoring an event designed to make money? The financial success of the event is pretty much assured, guaranteeing a profit for the Undergraduate Council.

Despite this financial success, will the event be a success from the students' point of view? This brings us to the second major problem with the proposal. Assuming that half of the undergraduate population attends the concert (I think that it will actually be a lower percentage than that), less than 10 percent of the seats in the stadium will be filled by Harvard undergraduates. In other words, the majority of the people in the audience will be non-Harvard students from the greater Boston area. Why then is the Undergraduate Council spending their time and effort to put on a concert for 35,000 people who have nothing to do with the college?

In the long run, the Council would better serve the undergraduate population by sponsoring several smaller concerts in Briggs cage or the Bright arena instead of this one large concert. These smaller concerts would not be designed as money-making ventures, but simply as social events for the students of the college.

Let's hope that the members of the Undergraduate Council will reconsider this proposal and do what is best for the students that they were elected to serve. John Lilycstrom '84