Politicos Blog UC Meeting

Two students live-blogged Sunday’s Undergraduate Council (UC) meeting—making UC meetings the latest event on campus to be reported on minute-by-minute.

Harvard Republican Club (HRC) members Stephen E. Dewey ’07 and Mark A. Shepard ’08 posted live updates throughout the meeting on the HRC’s website, RedIvy.org.

According to UC President John S. Haddock ’07, Sunday’s meeting was the first time a UC event had ever been live-blogged.

At last Sunday’s meeting, the council passed a report on the results of an online survey polling students on what they would like to see in a new women’s center.

Shepard said last night that he had decided to cover the council meeting because of Republican interest in the issue of a women’s center and also the UC’s decision before the meeting to deny funding to the Asian American Christian Fellowship (AACF).

For almost three hours, Dewey and Shepard followed the meeting, while at times interjecting commentary.

Dewey wrote at one point that Haddock was “consistently keeping” one UC member from “voicing his full concerns,” but an hour later acknowledged that his criticism was “unfair.”

In an interview last night, Haddock welcomed the increased interest in the UC.

“It was awesome to have the HRC and others there,” said Haddock. “My hope is that when people do have a specific interest that they do come out.”

Haddock added that the UC was currently exploring the possibility of its own blog.

“There are all these blogs that take up UC controversies,” he said. “It would be great to have that conversation ourselves, have people weigh in and give us comments back.”

In the past year, blogs have become more prominent within the Harvard community, soliciting comments on their websites and receiving responses on House open lists.

Blogs played an important role in last December’s UC presidential elections.

In December, Andrew H. Golis ’06, editor of the blog Cambridge Common, told The Crimson that his website received over 1,100 unique hits a day during election week.

In late February, rumors of President Lawrence H. Summers’ resignation spread across Harvard’s blogosphere and open lists before the Wall Street Journal broke the story the next morning.

Student leaders and bloggers said they are unconcerned with the increasing role blogs have begun to play in campus events.

“There is a risk of trying to top off rumor as hard news,” said Gregory M. Schmidt ’06, whose blog Team Zebra covered the UC presidential elections. “But I think that what most of the blogs offer is individual perspective.”

Dewey also agreed that blogs add to the debate.

“Blogs often cover specialized information, and while that information may not have mass appeal, it can be very useful to a modest number of people,” Dewey wrote in an e-mail.

—Staff writer Alexander D. Blankfein can be reached at ablankf@fas.harvard.edu.