The Skeptic

Jungmin Lee '01 does not consider himself politically apathetic.

After trying on for size several of Harvard's more visibly political student organizations, Lee, a joint concentrator in government and East Asian studies, belongs today to only one such club.

And that organization, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Student Council, is not one that would top most students' lists of campus political clubs.

Though some might label him politically apathetic because of his relative lack of involvement, Lee says that underneath this apparent apathy lies a strong desire for political activism and impact.

"I do care about social, political issues," Lee says. "I follow the presidential campaigns and I know that I'm a left-of-center moderate."

But political activism for him, he says, means more than party politics. To him it means contact with real people that achieves real, quantifiable results.

"I see the IOP or [Undergraduate Council] UC as not dealing with these issues which interest me, such as race relations, and what is the fair socio-economic distribution in society in the real world," Lee wrote in an e-mail message.

Lee recalls one of the more meaningful political experiences of his life. During his high school days in New York City, Lee volunteered for the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, an organization that helps poor residents of the city register to vote.

"When we went to get these people to register to vote, we could actually see the racial tensions playing themselves out," he says.

"The African-Americans and Hispanics would look distrustful when these nicely dressed Asian-Americans would come in and tell them to vote. Then, we would talk to them and make them feel comfortable," he adds. "It was a good feeling."

Then Lee came to Harvard.

He began with great enthusiasm for Harvard's more visibly political organizations, but says he soon found that "essentially, students were just doing administrative stuff. All these organizations were not getting to the root of political issues or the root of international relations enough for my taste."

Lee found himself dissipating his energies in activities that, to him, seemed futile.

One of these was Harvard National Model United Nations (HNMUN), a simulation of a United Nations conference, in which Harvard students serve as staff, running committees in which students from other colleges serve as UN delegates and debate controversial political topics.

With HNMUN, Lee says he hoped he would experience something akin to an actual UN conference.

But he was disillusioned by the actual events of the weekend.

"All we were doing was babysitting college students," he recalls, "and we could not even do that well because college students will not take other college students seriously.

" I felt as though a lot of guys were there just to schmooze and meet to girls," he adds.

The Institute of Politics (IOP), too, was a letdown for Lee.

He summarizes the organization's committee meetings as nothing more than "30 eager-beaver freshmen" jockeying to be part of the IOP's Student Advisory Committee.

The meetings, he says, were "totally unproductive."

Instead of meaningful experiences in political service, the IOP positions, he felt, were simply empty leadership titles.

"The IOP attracts only a certain type of student and repels those who might have a budding interest, but who are scared off by the over-competitiveness of the place," Lee wrote in the e-mail.

When Lee recognized his dissatisfaction with these organizations, he began looking for one better suited to his objectives.

He found the Weatherhead Center's student council, which has no professional staff, and so allows its member students far more autonomy than Lee found in the IOP committees.

The Weatherhead Center, says Lee, allows him "to deal with issues I feel are substantive and interesting, and try to educate people on international relations."

Recently, for instance, Lee helped to plan an event which included a colonel who had been a peacekeeper in Bosnia and an Emmy-winning Nieman fellow. They discussed the role of the press in the Bosnian conflict.

"We deal with much less bureaucracy," he says. "It does not have the competition of the IOP, and [the students] do a lot of the work."

Though he may appear apathetic compared to many of his campus cohorts, Lee has sought an outlet for his altruistic impulses off-campus. He also volunteers for the Boston chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, in an attempt to "move off the campus and its comps," he says.

Lee says he finally realized that if he "wanted to deal with real people on real-world issues, I would have to pull myself away from [the more public] political organizations."