Back to the Drawing Board

Why do we, the student body, elect the undergraduate council president and vice president? As the convoluted accusations and counter charges of the past weeks have grown more intense, this question has never been asked. The complications of the last presidential election make this a very opportune time to re-evaluate the merits of having the entire student body choose the leadership of the council.

We students spend 51 weeks of the year blissfully unconcerned with the council and its politics. But then we elect a president who is fundamentally an administrator without any real knowledge of how he or she has performed to date and no grasp of which candidates possess the set of skills necessary to work with the administration on behalf of students. Despite their flaws, perhaps it makes much more sense to have the council operate like other student organizations, where the members choose their own leaders based on the knowledge they gain by working alongside them all semester.

The areas where the council is effective illustrate the flaws in campus-wide elections. Council members have been at the forefront in bringing administrative reforms such as universal keycard access, fly-by lunches and extended shuttle hours. These worthwhile achievements are hardly easy. They come only through dealing with Harvard's Byzantine bureaucracy; navigating through a plethora of different offices and officials, all with different institutional agendas and personalities.

To make progress student advocates must have a certain set of skills. They must be able to negotiate without slipping into unproductive confrontation; they must maneuver in the tangle of administration armed with an understanding of the personalities of administrators and their concerns and responsibilities. They need to work slowly and methodically over months and semesters lobbying and persuading.

None of these skills are in the least related to what is necessary to win a campus-wide election. Naturally candidates boast about the battles they fought during their time on the council and their aptitude and acumen in dealing with the administration, but there is no real way to tell how accurate these claims are. Posters and debates can advertise ambitious programs calling for a wide array of new services and vague notions of campus life, but there is no way to communicate which candidates have the skills to bring their programs about.

Neither I, nor most students, have enough knowledge of the day-to-day working of the council to know who was most effective in changing library hours or getting better exercise equipment at the MAC. Since most students understandably don't have much information, elections are easily skewed towards candidates who can win the endorsements of large student organizations. Although it is natural to keep the recommendation of a trusted student group in mind when voting, it is too easy to win endorsements by dropping vague buzzwords that hardly translate into competence in office.

The council members who work with potential presidents and follow their week-to-week progress are best able to gauge which candidates would be most effective. If the council elects it own president, it can choose someone it knows to be effective in organizing the council's activities, just as they already do for most major administrative posts. Although choosing a president could easily degenerate into factional council squabble, this would be no worse than uninformed voting. It has become quite clear that campus-wide elections still leave ample room for council in-fighting.

All that is lost by having the council elect its own leaders would be the supposed moral value of having the student body elect its own leaders. But this claim fundamentally misunderstands the role of the council leadership. They might win the respect and gratitude of students by helping to bring about improvements in undergraduate life, but hardly anyone will ever see the council president as the leader of the student body or the manifest voice of undergraduate opinion. The president is at best a fine administrator with the potential to make worthwhile changes, and administrators are best chosen by those who know their abilities.

--CHARLES C. DESIMONE