Council Confirms Year-Long Agenda

After a month and a half in office, Undergraduate Council President Sujean S. Lee ’03 has finally come through on her promise to provide an outline for direction of the council for the rest of the spring.

Following the model of former council president Paul A. Gusmorino ’02, Lee provided council members at last night’s council meeting with a “road map” of meeting dates of and topics to be addressed in the council, council subcommittees and in student-faculty committees.

While the schedule provides detailed outlines for the rest of this month, the plan is quite scant for later periods.

However, Lee’s road map differs from that of Gusmorino in its inclusion of the names of council representatives who will be in charge of each project.

“The departure from last year is that each project has been claimed by an individual and we wrote the names on the road map,” Lee said. She said she hopes in including the names of those responsible for the projects will provide accountability.

At last night’s meeting, the council also learned that a previously contentious issue—removing “Radcliffe” from the organization’s formal name—will at discussed at next week’s meeting.

An amendment to the council’s constitution is required to change the name from the Harvard-Radcliffe Undergraduate Council. This requires that the proposed change be announced one meeting prior to its discussion and that two-thirds of members must vote in favor for it to pass.

Until Radcliffe’s merger with Harvard on Oct. 1, 1999, all female undergraduate were officially students of Radcliffe College.

A similar amendment proposed in December 1999 failed to gain a two-thirds majority by a razor-thin margin, receiving 45 favorable votes and 23 unfavorable votes.

Opponents to the name change at the time said that keeping the Radcliffe name highlighted the neglect of women’s rights on campus and the exclusion of students in the decision to merge with Radcliffe.

One chief opponent, Shai M. Sachs ’01, said at the time that the name should only be changed when the administration committed to building a women’s center and upgraded women’s studies to a full department.

Current council member Jim R. Griffin ’02 said that in the past the proposal demonstrated a “mean spiritedness” because it was done so quickly after the announcement that Radcliffe would be dissolved.

“It was like ‘he he, we can get rid of Radcliffe,’” he said.

But there is an indication that council opinions have shifted and members will decide to change the name when the council votes on the bill.

“My inclination is that it will pass,” Gusmorino said. “It was docketed and passed unanimously by the Student Affairs Committee.”

“I voted against it both times before and I’ll vote for it now,” Griffin said. “Nobody here knew Radcliffe. We’ve been using the name Harvard Undergraduate Council anyway.”

While he maintains that issues of the treatment of women on campus must be addressed, Gusmorino said that keeping Radcliffe in the council’s name does not serve as a political statement.

“No one would know that we had that name in there to protest,” he said. “It seems like a silly way to do that.”

Last night’s meeting also decided in a straw-poll vote to focus money on hosting a large band at Springfest rather than to fund rides. The office of President Lawrence H. Summers, which is working with the council to plan this year’s Springfest, had requested the vote.

—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.