Money Waster

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Last weekend our room received four copies of a bulky packet describing in detail the investigations of the CRR and the COI into the anti-apartheid demonstrations of April 24 and May 2, 1985. While we agree that all students should have access to these materials, we feel that the University was unnecessarily wasteful in mailing copies of these reports to every undergraduate.

This is not a trivial matter. Each packet was mailed through the U.S. Postal Service at a cost of $1.07. Multiplying this by the approximately 6400 undergraduates at Harvard reveals that over $6800 was spent on distribution alone. (This sum does not take into account the graduate students who received the mailing.) Each packet contained over 60 pages of printed material. Even at an extremely conservative estimate of $0.32 per packet (one half cent per page) for printing costs, this adds up to a total of over $2000. Even if every undergraduate wished to view these reports (which seems highly unlikely; many students will no doubt just throw their packets away), it would only be necessary to distribute one copy to each room, rather than to each student.

The University should simply have informed students that the information was available to interested parties, and facilitated access to these documents. Assuming, however, that the administration was determined to provide each and every undergraduate with his/her own personal copy, it could have been done in a far less extravagant manner. The University could have paid Harvard students to deliver the packages at a tiny fraction of the cost of postage. If it took an hour per house to distribute the packages, and, say, four hours for the freshmen dorms, Harvard would only have had to pay for sixteen hours of student work. Besides a savings of thousands of dollars, all money spent would have gone directly to students. Or, if the administration was so eager to spend $6800 on distribution, they could have paid the students $425 an hour to do the sixteen-hour job.

The administration's careless and extravagant use of funds is inexcusable. David S. Cohen '88   Frederick R. Davis '88   Zev J. Handel '88   Stuart M. Semmel '88