Transparency at the Council

The recent selection of representatives to the Katz Committee on Harvard's wage structure highlighted the potential of the Undergraduate Council to serve as an effective voice for student interests on campus. Unfortunately, it also outlined the barriers the council has yet to overcome. The membership of the council's Student Affairs Committee (SAC), which nominated candidates for the Katz Committee, was not available online. The votes were conducted by secret ballot. And the 25-5 council-wide vote to confirm the selections was unrecorded-so students won't necessarily know whether their representatives were among the five dissenters (or the 25 members who voted in favor).

Such opaque procedures make it difficult for students to check up on their representatives. Concerned students could always contact their representatives or go to open meetings to watch who raises their hand. But it is not the students' task to divine the inner workings of the council-it is the council's job to serve the students by making its practices transparent.

Though the nominations for the Katz Committee have received a great deal of attention, the council appoints student members to a number of Faculty committees, including the Committee on House Life, the Committee on College Life, the Committee on Undergraduate Education and the Standing Committee on the Core Program. These committees exert strong influence over decisions that students care about, such as later party hours, universal keycard access and Core credit for departmental classes.

Yet the chain of accountability connecting these committee members to student desires is greatly attenuated. These committee members are said to speak for the student body because the students' representatives selected them. But if the nominations are conducted in secret, students at large exercise no formal influence over the selection. Secrecy prevents constituents from rewarding a wise choice of nominees or punishing a poor one; it encourages inertia rather than change and has no place in a representative system.

We recognize the concern that open ballots might create embarrassing situations for candidates. Surely some candidates would prefer that their selection be conducted by secret ballot. But students who volunteer for positions of public service necessarily open themselves to public scrutiny and evaluation. A concern for their feelings should not prevent the council from serving its constituency.

Given that the council's work is done within a small community, recorded voting might also create difficult decisions for council members who would be passing judgment on their friends or acquaintances. But for every representative who is unwilling to make a public vote against a friend, another might use the secret ballot to hide any favors to close acquaintances. A public record would also help convince representatives voting on their friends to recuse themselves from the decision. As Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Class of 1877, noted, "Sunshine is the best disinfectant."

Making the council more accountable would go a long way towards restoring students' respect for their elected representatives. Part of the reason why council elections receive less attention than they should is that they are drowned in empty promises; when no mechanisms of accountability are in place, it becomes impossible to make an informed choice among six candidates promising cable TV by the fall. Greater transparency and accountability would force candidates to concentrate on the achievable, giving them a record to run on-or to run against.

Some measures of accountability would be relatively simple to implement. The membership of SAC and the council's other committees is public and available for the asking. Listing the members of council committees on the council's website would be an easy step, and one that would help students communicate their views to the members of the relevant council committees. Not all students want to make their views known through a campus-wide e-mail list.

But the council needs to do more than create new avenues of communication. Currently, members' votes are not recorded unless a fifth of the council votes to do so. It is impossible for students to judge their representatives' performance without a record of how they voted on important issues. Recording purely procedural votes might be helpful, but recording final votes on nominations, amendments and bills should be seen as a responsibility. It would take only a short initial investment of programming time to make the council's website into a powerful resource for students to check on their representatives' attendance and voting patterns. After the system is created, the additional workload of entering information would be minor compared to the benefits increased transparency would bring the student community.

This session of the council has performed admirably thus far in addressing issues of student concern, and the new "uc-announce" service has been a useful index of council accomplishments. But if the council wants to be taken seriously-and to wield the influence on campus that it deserves-it must adopt measures of accountability that are appropriate to a serious representative body.

After all, the Katz Committee should be only the first step. The University ought to solicit the opinion of the students more often, and the easiest way for it to do so is to consult an accountable council.