The Letter of the Law

On May 8, the sudden resignation of Undergraduate Council Vice President Ian W. Nichols ’06 steered Harvard’s student government into uncharted territory. The council’s inadequate response to the unexpected crisis, which saw former vice presidential candidate Clay T. Capp ’06 elected at a special council meeting last Thursday, speaks to a real need for change in the council’s bylaws. The selection of the council vice president is a matter too important to be left to a small group of representatives—subject to immense internal political pressures—at the end of their respective terms. The council must change its rules so that the vice president’s selection adequately reflects the needs and interests of the 6,500 term-bill-fee-paying undergraduates to whom the council is ultimately responsible.

While we feel that Capp’s selection as vice president exposes real flaws in the council’s rules of procedure, we also recognize that, under the rules as they now stand, his election was legitimate. The UC ought to move on from the regrettable circumstances of Capp’s election to focus on what it needs to get done through the end of the school year and over the summer. That business, however, ought to include changes to the council’s bylaws to reflect the inadequacy of the current system of internally choosing replacements for council officials who leave office unexpectedly.

Capp was elected council vice president with a margin of just two votes over graduating senior Jason L. Lurie ’05. The closeness of the 22-20 vote is worrying particularly because it amounts to 22 students choosing a vice president responsible to 6,500 undergraduates, and for the term-bill fees that those undergraduates pay each year. That a victory this narrow can determine the person to administer students’ money is unacceptable. The UC, confronted with a real constitutional crisis, must change its rules to remedy the inadequate current procedures.

It is definitely necessary for the council to have a vice president in place over the summer to facilitate the ongoing work of the executive board. The manner of Capp’s election can be justified by the timing of Nichols’ resignation, which came at the beginning of reading period, when looming exams and severe time pressure would have precluded a full election campaign regardless of the council’s bylaws. This reasoning fails, however, because the council’s rules mandate this kind of internal selection, timing aside.

In the future, if the council vice president resigns too late in the year for proper full elections to take place, the council should internally elect an interim vice president, to serve until the soonest convenient time at which a student vote can take place. This would ensure that the summer remains a productive time for the council, without costing undergraduates their rightful say in the selection of their vice president. Of course, if the vice president were to resign when it was convenient for a full student-body vote to be held, then a permanent replacement ought to be elected, with no need for an interim choice. The council must change its bylaws to ensure that this kind of effective disenfranchisement does not happen in the future.

As council vice president, Clay Capp can claim little more than a tenuous mandate. Capp, who failed to win the position in last December’s elections, won the post by the narrowest of margins against an opponent who is to graduate in three weeks. The executive board, lacking a clear and strong mandate to govern, should now be highly self-critical and especially careful in the decisions that they make about spending student money.