Gusmorino Urges Better Publicity Efforts

In response to confusion in Adams House over the deadline for student grant applications, Undergraduate Council President Paul A. Gusmorino ’02 urged council members to be more responsive to constituent inquiries.

No Adams House council representatives sit on the council’s financial committee, leading to low publicity for the grant deadline in Adams House, according to many on the council.

Gusmorino said he hopes council members—if they do not know specific answers to constituents’ questions—will be sure to refer the constituent to someone who does.

“Every member doesn’t know every detail of every initiative,” he said.

Gusmorino said he is working on standardizing council publicity so that each member would have specific assignments for postering or sending e-mail announcements over each house’s e-mail list.

“We want to routinize our publicity procedures to assure that we are keeping students fully informed of what the council is doing,” he said.

In other council business, the co-chairs of the council’s campus life committee announced that the two components of their committee—the “social” and the “services” sub-groups—will meet separately in the future.

The “social” sub-group handles events such as the Harvard-Yale tailgate and the “services” group coordinate council shuttle services.

Committee co-chairs Robert M. Gee ’02 and Melissa A. Eccleston ’02 made the decision unilaterally to split the committee to improve its efficiency, Gee said.

Committee members were not asked for input in the decision—a move that caused some surprise among some on the committee.

“It’s generally better for [the co-chairs] to run it by the members of the committee first,” even if it was the right decision, said council member James C. Coleman ’03.

Gee, however, downplayed the importance of the decision.

“If it was a controversial decision, we would have consulted the committee first,” he said.

—Staff writer William M. Rasmussen can be reached at wrasmuss@fas.harvard.edu.