Sticky Fingers

"I DON'T SEE what the problem is," Social Committee Chairman Hamburg Tang '88 told the Undergraduate Council. "It couldn't be bad for the council to get its name out before the students in this non-political, non-controversial way."

With Tang's advice in mind, the half-filled room of council members threw their weight behind a plan designed to prove they hadn't lost touch with their constituents. The council voted to spend $500 dollars of student-supplied money to buy fingers--foam rubber "Big Fingers," which will proclaim that Harvard, like every other North American university with an athletic team, is "1."

The Big Fingers will be handed out at the Cornell and UVM hockey games. They will be paid for out of the $10 student activities fee included on every undergraduate's term bill.

The $500 Big Fingers expenditure was larger than more than two thirds of the grants awarded to student groups by the council this semester. The sum will go to the Miller Brewing Co., which sold the council the fingers and emblazoned its logo across them as part of a promotional campaign.

Many students have said during the past week that they intend to set their representatives straight by explaining the hypocrisy of the plan to buy the fingers, which will bear prominently the council's own name as well as claims of Harvard and Miller beer ascendancy. We hope those students take the time, theirs and their representatives', to talk back.

Aaron DiAntonio '88, a representative from Mather House, tried to point out difficulties with the plan on the council floor. DiAntonio called the fingers "cute, but not $500 worth of cute." But his advice received scant consideration from the not-quite-50 of Harvard's 88 council members who were present to vote on the plan. Pressed for time after passing nearly an hour discussing the council's responsibility to speak out on "controversial political questions," the members devoted about five minutes to approving the fingers expenditure.

And that highlights a larger problem with the way the council does business.

The council members evidently see cute moves, or at least expensive cute moves, as adequate attention to the students who make possible grand political discussions and the drafting of endless amendments to the student government's tome-like by-laws.

The council, however, is not just another student activity; it uses our money to operate and purports to be the students' government. Its members have apparently forgotten that, choosing instead to approach the body as a crash course in bureaucracy.

The council should make an effort to return to the issues that matter to students. If not, maybe everyone will realize that it's not just a joke when their elected representatives give them big fingers, and maybe they'll return an appropriate gesture of confidence next time they're asked to vote.