Our Finest Hour?

A little more than a month ago, the College moved to abrogate Undergraduate Council (UC) funding of alcohol purchases for student-thrown parties. The UC cried foul, accusations flew, and a standoff ensued. Now we are told a compromise has been reached. The result? The UC will not fund alcohol purchases for student-thrown parties.

The only difference seems to be that while the UC was busy passionately denouncing the College’s violation of “student citizenship” in early October, it now seems perversely satisfied. On the UC’s e-mail list, representative Brian S. Gillis ’08 went so far as to claim that the new party fund agreement represented “one of the greatest victories in UC history.”

If this really is one of the greatest victories in UC history, it has been a pretty sorry history indeed. Anything more than a perfunctory examination reveals this “victory” for what it is: almost complete capitulation in the face of an admittedly undefeatable adversary.

While the UC can attempt to spin the agreement—which marks the end of over a month of protracted negotiations over the party fund and the suspension of UC funding—however it likes, the fact of the matter is the College got exactly what it asked for: a suspension of reimbursement for alcoholic beverages. While the party fund technically still exists, it can only be used to cover non-alcoholic expenses, which were never a source of contention in the first place.

Some argue that the money the UC will dole out in the future for non-alcoholic party purchases is fungible. Party organizers, they claim, can simply use their own funds to cover adult beverages, the UC allotment to cover miscellaneous party supplies, and ultimately end up spending the same amount of their own money they would have even if the party fund still covered alcohol. This is apparently the line of thinking the UC has pursued in seeking to expand the range of purchases the Party Fund will cover. But it ultimately fails the test of practicality; beer, wine, and liquor compose the bulk of the expenses for the vast majority of UC-funded parties.

In addition, the new agreement is not a particularly meaningful assertion of UC autonomy. While the College is no longer officially telling the UC how to allocate its resources, this is only because the UC willingly consented to follow the College’s demands. And though the compromise promises to set up a new grievance procedure involving Faculty Council arbitration for future disputes between the UC and the College, it is difficult to conceive of a situation in which the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—or its 18-member executive body—would overrule the Dean of the College.

Ultimately, the UC is still facing the exact same reality that it faced a month ago: It is an association of students in an institution where the real power lies with administrators.

Nevertheless, this is far from a statement proclaiming the UC useless. It has had many successes as an advocacy organization in past years that have improved the quality of student life immeasurably. Those successes, however, almost always depend on the goodwill of faculty and administrators to student concerns—particularly in areas where the UC cannot make do solely through its own initiatives. On issues where compromise is not an option for University Hall, the UC is impotent.

This outcome was foreseeable from the beginning. While the UC’s dramatic standoff with the administration made for some great political theater, it is hard to imagine what the UC believed it was going to accomplish given that it was going up against an opponent that had the weight of money, power, and federal and state law on its side. If the UC really wanted to secure the future of a non-alcoholic party fund, surely less confrontational measures could have been used—it shouldn’t take a month to get the College to pay for chips and salsa. We also fear that the UC’s grandstanding lost it credibility and political capital in the eyes of the Faculty, commodities especially valuable if the UC intends to convince professors of the benefits of its many other laudable initiatives.

Whether the end of the party fund will actually decrease dangerous drinking on campus is still a matter for debate. One thing is clear, though: The UC should learn to choose its battles if it doesn’t wish to fall further into irrelevance.