The 'New' Council Needs You

One of the defining moments of my first year came while sitting in one of my first Undergraduate Council meetings. During a vote, the then president hovered over a group of timid first-years and told us to "show some f***ing accountability," in other words, to vote the way he wanted us to. That was a very different council, but even up to a year ago, the council was a highly politically charged and politically divisive place. Conservatives had a special area of the room in which they sat religiously. The most progressive students on the council did as well. Almost every vote was a roll call vote, and several students could be found sitting in the aisles tallying the votes for their own curiosity, with the final result hanging in the balance until the last moment.

In those days, it wasn't that hard to get people to run for the Council. As much as everyone--conservative and progressive--complained about the insane atmosphere, the fact of the matter was that we felt important. Every vote mattered because every vote was close. And who you were friends with, who you worked for on a campaign, whether you went to 'Nochs or Tommy's after the meeting all mattered, because from everyone's perspective, the council was a place where there was right and wrong. Conservatives joined to stop those insane progressives; progressives joined to fight the tyranny of those reactionary conservatives.

Those days are largely gone. The council today is a body in transition. Today's council is one on which Kamil E. Redmond '00 and I, bitter enemies during last year's campaign, now swap war stories over pizza. Today's council has much less to do with politics and much more to do with serving students. It is, I hope, a better council, a council that the students of this school asked for in the past election. But it is a council which needs a fresh wave of new blood. It needs students who stayed away in the past because they didn't want to spend five hours every Sunday night sitting in meetings, and students who never before even thought of running, but are willing to today because they want to serve their fellow students.

This does not mean that the council is now just a "glorified high school dance committee." There are real issues on this campus that need to be addressed. The Class of 2002 is the first group of students to enter a fully randomized residential system, and it is in this year that the Committee on House Life (a student-faculty committee) will conduct its four-year review on randomization.

Randomization is in fact one of my top personal priorities. The effects on students who have been quadded, on minorities, and on all students who are experiencing house life in a very different way are elements of a system whose fate has not yet been entirely written. And because randomization impacts every crevice of the student body, every perspective is needed, every bit of ideological diversity is a necessity.

At the same time, departmental substitutes in the Core have yet to be properly implemented and effectively explained, and the almost unanimous votes for universal keycard access in four House referendums last year have yet to move House Masters.

Fair Harvard, my friends, still has a bit of dust swept under the rug. And though the council still deals with pressing student issues, it does so in a friendlier and more efficient manner. By virtue of being Harvard students, we are all blessed with excellently refined critical skills. We are all capable of looking around the campus and seeing with clear and precise vision that some things are wrong or unfair or poorly done.

We all know that Harvard is a place much better endowed with talk than action, with ambition rather than hard work. So here it is: your school--your student government needs you. It knows that you are already playing rugby and doing common casting, and comping FM, and starting up your own PBH group, but it needs you still. It needs your voice, your ideas, your commitment. It needs you because you are a creative and intelligent person, infused with a mind or soul that is uniquely yours and unsupplied by the next guy or gal.

Join the council. In so doing, find a forum for the complaints you have made over the years; find a place where you can act on those complaints and turn them into successes through close work with the top administrators of the College; find a place where you can start to build the sense of community that Harvard so painfully lacks.

It's your turn to run. Or else, many years from now, faced with five letters from various Harvard auspices asking for money, and reflecting upon all that was right with Harvard, but also all that was wrong, you will be an alum who never took a stand, who not once made the commitment to change Harvard for the better on behalf of those around you, and those yet to come.

Beth A. Stewart '00 is president of the Undergraduate Council. She is a government concentrator in Winthrop House.