Strength Through Discourse

If the locals know best, then Harvard is the biggest waste of $17 billion since the Big Dig. From hearing us students talk, one would conclude that a Harvard education depends wholly on incompetent teaching fellows who missed the memo on learning English, a miserable Core Curriculum comprised of useless huge classes that no one wants to take and a social life that is about as much fun as the gulag. If we all think Princeton focuses more on undergraduate education, Yale has more fun and Columbia has a better city, than why are we all here?

I personally believe that all of the above complaints about Harvard are completely false and that the atmosphere created by these all-too-common gripes seems to do more to make our time here negative than the actual conditions we are complaining about. The reason this overwhelming negative attitude about Harvard persists is that most of us perceive that we have nowhere to channel our legitimate gripes. We then feed off each others’ grievances, trying to one-up each other, until we are left with a boiling pot of self pity. Because we hear these exaggerated problems over and over without resolution, we come to accept them as truths, making our perception of Harvard much worse than reality. Our complaints become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is a solution to this problem, and it lies in the Undergraduate Council. I know that many have written the council off as mostly ineffective, but it is this very loss of faith in the council by students that weakens it. The council’s role relative to the administration is as our lobbying group. The power of a lobbying group on any scale is that it allows those with the same underlying goals to speak with one voice. The National Rifle Association is much more powerful with Charlton Heston speaking for a million gun owners than with many individual gun owners complaining on their own, often conflicting with each other. Yet what we have now at Harvard are dozens of campus groups all pushing for divergent and often conflicting priorities, and individual students with extreme views shouting past each other on issue as disparate as the keg ban and the curriculum review. If we cannot even agree among ourselves about what we want, how will the administration ever respond? We are stuck in a vicious cycle where, because we have lost faith in the ability of our elected representatives to generate a sensible unified voice, we are left with myriad splinter groups that are arguing so forcefully for their own particular views that they undercut the shared student agenda.

In order to solve the twin problems of not getting what we want from the administration and having our dissatisfaction fester into unhappiness and further splintering, we must be willing to engage in a single campus debate, the result of which will be advocated by our council. I am not suggesting that all students should come into campus debate with identical views; but contrary to the present condition we must channel our disagreements toward a productive compromise. Only if we can enter into a dialogue with our council representatives and be informed enough to elect those that will be accountable to our views will we be justified in expecting significant results. If the administration sees that students have faith in their council—and provide a united voice behind them—they will take these views more seriously, and we’ll see the ideas we banter about turn into the policies that shape our campus.

The administration has recently shown an increased openness to student opinion—now it is our turn to step up. University President Lawrence H. Summers and Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby have spoken with the council about a range of student issues—from SpringFest to the Core curriculum—showing both that they are open to our opinion and that they see the council as the purveyor of it. But the council has been hampered in representing us because the administration has been bombarded by student opinion from all sides. We are much easier to write off as whining kids when we can’t even agree among ourselves.

What I suggest is not revolutionary, it is just good government. As public debate and discussion have faded in America, so has confidence in government, and so has the power of government to affect change. As the next generation of leaders it is our duty to be active citizens and there is no better arena for this than our own University. It is time for both the students and the Undergraduate Council to come out of their respective foxholes and join in a single campus debate.

Though I have outlined broad goals, we can start in this upcoming presidential election. If a large number of students turn out to the presidential debate at the ARCO Forum this Sunday, the administration will see that we care what the council does, and that will give our arguments the weight they need to become reality.

Joseph K. Green ’05 is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House. He is chair of the Harvard Political Union.