Enough is Enough

Students elected to the Undergraduate Council often expect to endure their classmates’ ridicule and the administration’s cold shoulder. What they don’t expect to endure is several thousand dollars in personal credit card debt. Personal debt, however, is exactly the predicament that council members Trisha S. Dasgupta ’03 and Robert M. Gee ’02 currently face. In February, Dasgupta and Gee doled out $600 and $1300, respectively, in order to cover over-budget costs of a Harvard-sponsored summit of the Ivy Council—an umbrella organization for student council members of the Ivy League schools. Dasgupta and Gee operated under the belief that the organization would pay them back immediately. The check has now been in the mail for more than two months, and to date, they have received no reimbursement. This Sunday night, the council will decide whether to assume the debt in their place.

While we can’t help but consider Dasgupta and Gee a little foolhardy for taking a leap of monetary faith in an organization that has proven itself financially and administratively irresponsible in the past, we do believe that the council should vote to reimburse them. Dasgupta and Gee were unfairly placed in the position of having to dip into their own pocketbooks or face the embarrassment of turning away speakers, starving hungry participants and watching the summit disintegrate before their eyes. The council must take responsibility for placing its own members in such a compromised position and pursue the deadbeat Ivy Council for payment.

At the same time, the council must withdraw its support for the Ivy Council immediately. For years the council has dedicated its financial support and personal efforts to the Ivy Council while reaping returns that are dismal at best. Time and again, Ivy Council meetings have proven to be an unproductive waste of resources—at a three-day meeting in New York in 1999, Ivy Council members engaged in only three hours of meetings on tangible issues of student life. Indeed, the most well-known idea generated by the Ivy Council was the failed Census 2000 of Fentrice D. Driskell ’01 and John A. Burton ’01, an endeavor known more for the information it didn’t collect than for what it did. With this latest mishap, the Ivy Council has proven to be not only incapable of living up to its goal of fostering productive dialogue between Ivy League schools but also has shown itself to be a major financial drain as well.

In the past semester the council has taken responsible steps towards scaling back its support of expensive and unnecessary events, such as outside bands for Springfest. In January, the council committed to withdrawing from the Ivy Council unless it adopted ten demands, one of which was the creation of a budget a month in advance. Given that the Ivy Council finds itself unable to maintain basic financial responsibility, it is time that Harvard withdraw its support.