Reporter's Notebook

"I thought it was fun."

--Dean of the Law School Robert C. Clark after a stormy meeting with 200 students, during which many assembled questioned the dean's commitment to training future public interest attorneys and took him to task for an expected 8 percent tuition increase.

Former New York Mayor Edward I. Koch was outspoken as ever on his visit to Harvard on Sunday. He said he was enjoying his post-political life, which involves co-hosting a TV show, doing daily radio commentary and writing a weekly column for The New York Post.

He said in an interview that he had carried many of his old opinions with him into his new life. "I don't like the press. But as one reporter said to me the other day, 'But you're part of us now.' I said, 'Well I still don't have to like us, do I?'"

"I left early to go to the Lampoon event with John Cleese. It seemed much more important. No one gives a crap about the grants package."

--Undergraduate Council member E. Adam Webb '93

"I realize people have other things to do than UC. But when people miss meetings just because they don't want to show up, that's what I want to see eliminated. Basically any excuse will do. If your grandmother was in town, that's fine. But I don't think that was the case for 45 people Sunday night."

--Council Chair Guhan Subramanian '91-'92

The council could not maintain a quorum at last Sunday's meeting, one which many consider to be the most important of the year. At the quorum call, less than half the council's 89 members were present for the semiannual grants session, when the body is supposed to distribute $35,000 to student groups. In reaction, the executive board will now require written excuses from anyone absent from a meeting.

"It was a pretty straightforward presentation of the financial needs of Harvard. Basically, it just described where Harvard gets its money, and where it spends its money. It's a soft sell. It sells by informing."

--Faculty Council member Mark Birkinshaw on Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence's new slide show, some form of which he will eventually use to solicit money during Harvard's upcoming fundraising drive, expected to be higher education's largest ever.

In an interview this week, President Derek C. Bok professed himself unfazed by the flurry of reports about unsafe drinking water in Cambridge. "It would take a lot more than anything I've read to change my habits. I'm going to go ahead and drink whatever's handy and let nature take its course," he said.

" Democrats and Republicans have to lie; if they told you the truth, you would tell them to go to hell...Because of my pro-socialist, pro-gay, pro-Black stance, I was not covered by the newspapers. I was white-outed."

--Lenora Fulani, New Alliance Party candidate for president, in a Harvard visit this week.