Driskell, Burton Cope With Impeachment Trial, Referenda

Perhaps the most common knock on the Undergraduate Council is that it is out of touch with the student body.

The council, the argument goes, is too caught up in internal bickering and political posturing to bother to find out what students really want from it.

As a result, students find it largely irrelevant.

How ironic, then, that the council's 1999-2000 year was defined not by its own actions but by the decisions made on Dec. 15, 1999 by the very student body that apparently finds it so useless.

That day, students voted in referenda to downsize the council to 50 members but not to increase its funding by upping the term bill fee from $20 to $50--ensuring next year's council will be small and broke.

And they soundly rejected the council Executive Board's hand-picked successors to President Noah Z. Seton '00 and Vice President Kamil E. Redmond '00.

By a wide margin, they elected council liberals Fentrice D. Driskell '01 and John A. Burton '01 over conservatives Sterling P. A. Darling '01 and Nehal S. Patel '01 and other tickets.

With this, students set the stage for an investigation into Driskell-Burton campaign irregularities that was not resolved until Feb. 13, when the council impeached Burton but voted not to remove him.

The Burton Impeachment

The issue at hand--whether Burton violated campaign rules by taking over 100 buttons from the resource center of the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters' Alliance (BGLTSA)--was bizarre in itself.

And the Feb. 13 "trial"--featuring Burton supporters waving signs and BGLTSA Co-Chair Michael A. Hill '02 playing O.J. Simpson trial fixture Kato Kaelin--was a "parody," according to Redmond.

By the time the smoke cleared, the national media had picked up the story.

Driskell and Burton were left standing, but after over half the council--but not the required two-thirds--voted to expel Burton, council members had serious questions as to how effectively the two could lead the council.

Four months later, it is not clear that those questions have entirely gone away.

Burton is still held in very low regard by a large part of the council, say many members.

And conservative opponents have taken every opportunity to criticize his performance in office--most notably when they stopped a meeting for over half an hour to contest Burton's expulsion of a member for poor attendance.

Furthermore, there is evidence that Driskell--who claimed a broad popular mandate for her progressive agenda after easily winning the election--lost much of her political capital by loyally defending Burton.

Initially, sponsors of the impeachment bill accused Driskell of "playing the race card" in her statements to the press, saying she insinuated the impeachment of Burton, who is black, by 10 white council members may have been racially motivated.

Driskell maintained her comments were taken out of context and that the impeachment was politically, not racially, motivated.

Three of the impeachment bill's 10 sponsors ran for president against Driskell, and seven attended a Republican Club dinner four days before the impeachment trial.

Yet even Driskell supporters acknowledged she should have handled the race question differently.

Driskell and opponents publicly reconciled, but Driskell-backed council projects have not received kind treatment from conservatives.

Driskell opponents loudly protested the council's Spirit Week--during which students and Faculty were encouraged to wear theme clothing--as juvenile and bound to fail.

And according to Driskell, they did not cooperate with her plan to conduct a campus-wide survey intended to identify student concerns.

A group of conservatives tried to slash funding for the project, known as Census 2000. When this failed, they haggled with Driskell over individual census questions.

The result for both Spirit Week and Census 2000 was low student participation. To date, Driskell has only collected about 70 of 500 census forms.

Driskell says that although she "still feel[s] some resistance," she keeps her optimistic outlook.

"At the end of the day, all we are is students trying to do things for students," she says.

Back to Square One

Council debate once again centered on the question of whether it should primarily agitate for improved student services or progressive political causes--two sides that are often, for simplicity, called liberal and conservative.

With Driskell in the chair, the council passed statements urging the University to act on labor and environmental issues, police brutality and sexual violence--each time with the opposition of council conservatives.

Conservatives point to the success of initiatives like universal keycard access and UC Books, the council's online textbook-selling service, as signs the council should only focus on student services.

Driskell has argued that while student services and campus-wide events are clearly important--she lauds UC Books, as well as Springfest and the Har'd CORPS community service day--there is a place for political advocacy on the council.

In one sense, the second-semester liberal-conservative divide was an improvement over that of the first term. Under Seton and Redmond's watch, the council's leadership itself was split along ideological lines.

By last fall, the Seton-Redmond partnership--which aimed to unite the council--was in disrepair. At one point, the council president and vice president were no longer speaking to one another.

Ideological differences between the two boiled over in November, when Redmond publicly railed against the council's unwillingness to push the administration--a clear shot at Seton's work-within-the-system philosophy.

Redmond said she also felt a conservative "cabal" dominated the council. According to Redmond, the chair and vice chair of the Student Affairs Committee (SAC)--John Paul Rollert '00 and Michael D. Shumsky '00--wielded too much influence over Seton and the council.

Shumsky is one of what Driskell calls the "few die-hards" who refuse to accept what she sees as the gradual elimination of the liberal-conservative split on the council.

Yet the distinction seems unlikely to disappear from council politics any time soon.

Council observers anticipate the next presidential election will pit Campus Life Committee (CLC) Co-Chair Stephen N. Smith '02, a member of the Progressive Student Labor Movement, against SAC Vice Chair Paul A. Gusmorino '02, who masterminded UC Books.

Leaner and Meaner?

However, some issues cut across the political spectrum this year.

Council members largely agreed on two main things in the past year. They agreed that the council was too big and that it was too poor.

In a Dec. 15 referendum, the student body took care of the first problem, voting to cut the council's size from roughly 90 down to 50 members.

Everyone seemed to agree this was the best way to deal with low attendance and high dropout rates. The downsized council will debut next year, with only three members per House.

"It's going to be better," Driskell says. "It's going to be much harder to slip through the cracks."

Students showed little faith in the council, though, by voting not to raise the student activity fee on the term bill from $20 to $50 per year, which would have put the council's budget on par with many other schools of Harvard's size.

The referendum's failure was particularly painful to the council because the vote was so close.

"If I had known [the margin] would only be 80 people," says Seton, who went door-to-door to push the initiative, "I would have coerced another 80 people."

Regardless, the increase's failure represents a huge challenge for next year's council.

Past councils, including last year's--which mysteriously discovered $40,000 in misplaced funds--have had enough money to roll over significant sums to the following term.

But as the number of student groups and their funding requirements continue to increase, the $20 figure set in 1983 may no longer be adequate.

Smith says the fee should be adjusted to $30 just to account for nearly two decades of inflation.

According to Darling, the council's treasurer, it will soon become necessary to decide whether the council ought to show less generosity to student groups or whether it should skimp on Springfest--maybe holding the event once every two years.

This year, the council showed signs of financial restraint in the face of the upcoming drought.

At $15,000, the headlining band, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, was a bargain compared to 1999's Violent Femmes.

And to the sadness of many, Springfest 2000 lacked the traditional fried dough because CLC did not feel it was cost-effective.

But in the end, says Redmond and others, the council's penny-pinching just will not get the job done.

Redmond says she thinks Driskell and Burton--or their successors--will have to go the administration for money, and Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 will have to save Springfest by unilaterally raising the term bill fee.

Seton is not quite as pessimistic, though he is "not really sure" how the situation will be resolved.

"Anything they're going to do is going to be a fight, because they don't have the money," Seton says. "But they'll figure it out."

"Fentrice and John will be more effective in [their] second semester," Seton offers. "Everyone is."

But given the black eye the Burton impeachment gave the council, it is hard to say whether "more effective" will be effective enough.

Redmond says the lingering effects of the impeachment may still handicap Driskell and Burton, who were not members of SAC and did not start their tenure with the experience dealing with administrators Seton had before he took office.

"It was so ugly, and it hurt so much," Redmond says of the impeachment.

And here lies the other irony:

While the council may not be proud of the messy and painful Burton scandal, at least the impeachment made students pay attention to its workings for a few weeks.

So it can be done.