New UC Passes First Bill

The Undergraduate Council unanimously passed a bill on Sunday creating an ad-hoc student relations committee that will aim to improve communication between the UC and the student body.

The committee is charged with maintaining the UC’s Web site, sending out a weekly e-mail newsletter, and holding public town hall meetings, along with other outreach efforts

According to Eric N. Hysen ’11, the UC parliamentarian, no undergraduates who are not members of the Council or the media are in the habit of attending UC general meetings. “We want to have events where any student will be able to come in and talk about what they want the UC to do,” he said.

“The legislation itself is setting up a structure,” Hysen said. “[The bill is] not really a step one to fixing [the UC’s communications problem]—it is more like a step zero,” he said.

The legislation is the first passed by the Council since the inauguration of Andrea R. Flores ’10 and Kia J. McLeod ’10 as president and vice-president last Monday.

Daniel V. Kroop ’10, a UC representative who served as the campaign manager for the Flores campaign, said that the creation of the committee represented a fulfilment of one of Flores’ campaign promises.

Kroop, who is currently the UC’s communications director, will co-chair the committee along with Amanda Lu ’11, the current public relations director. Lu said that the new committee would address the concern that students were not made aware of Council projects.

Flores said that the UC Web site will be re-designed as a part of the new outreach initiative.

“[Students can] still apply for a party grant technically on the Web site now,” Lu said, pointing to the current site’s outdatedness. The party grant fund was terminated in Oct. 2007 by then-Dean of the College David R. Pilbeam. “That is not acceptable,” she said.

After Sunday’s meeting, UC members were required to send out e-mails to their house-lists summarizing the UC general meeting—a practice that was commonplace when Ryan A. Petersen ’08 served as president of the council, but which fell-off during the subsequent presidency of Matthew L. Sundquist ’09.

“I think that the UC can always do a better job of communicating. It is a difficult job to tackle,” Sundquist said of the outreach effort. “It is hard to figure out a way to break through the noise.”

Despite the difficulties involved, Sundquist readily admitted that the emphasis on communication was worthwhile.

“The more people that know about something, the greater chance it has to succeed,” he said.

—Staff writer Eric P. Newcomer can be reached at newcomer@fas.harvard.edu.