Council Reacts to Dowling Report

The Dowling Report, a review charged with the task of considering student governance on campus, was released Monday to mixed reactions from past and present Undergraduate Council members.

While some UC members called it a necessary first step for improving the council’s effectiveness and efficiency, others called it an underwhelming follow-up to a landmark document of the same name that founded the UC.

“It’s the report of another committee chair by John Dowling, but it’s not the successor to the Dowling Report,” said Eric N. Hysen ’11, the UC’s parliamentarian. “I was sort of hoping for something a little bit more.”

Some members of the UC added that the review did not pay enough attention to student governance at the College as a whole, and disproportionately focused on details about the inner workings of the UC’s structure.

Officially titled the “Report of the Committee to Review the Undergraduate Council,” the document prescribes relatively few recommendations that had been reached unanimously by the committee.

Instead, the bulk of the 40-page report consists of an “open issues” section which describes the discussion points upon which the committee had not yet reached a consensus, in addition to an internal review produced by three UC members.

Though the report did not bring closure to many long-standing debates about the UC’s structure, some conclusions were reached.

In what is widely considered to be the most significant recommendation, the Dowling Report proposed restructuring the student-faculty committees.

“On the issue of the student-faculty committee, that’s something [UC members] have all agreed on for a while and is something [the UC] should really push for,” said Tamar Holoshitz ’10, chair of the Student Affairs Committee.

The change in the student-faculty committee structure suggested by the Dowling Report would be matched by a change in the structure of the UC’s advocacy body.

Instead of simply having one advocacy committee, the SAC would be replaced by three committees to correspond with the three proposed student-faculty committees.

Along with the changes that would provide a more hierarchical structure, student-faculty committee members would also be given decision-making power, subject to a veto by the Dean that chairs the committee.

Changes to the structure of the Finance Committee were also proposed, including a reduction in the committee’s size and a rotating membership drawn from the three proposed advocacy committees.

“I don’t see any real drawback to have a smaller committee,” said FiCom chair Sundeep S. Iyer ’11.

However, several UC members pointed to the benefits of institutional memory, which would be lost if the membership constantly changed.

“FiCom operates on a specific set of policies and requires a knowledge of our precedents,” Iyer said. “The only way to effectively know about grants would be through the experience of assessing grants on a week-to-week basis.”

The Dowling Report also faces the same problems that it has been trying to correct: while the report has some firm recommendations, it has no legislative power and therefore depends on the efforts of people not involved in the committee’s affairs to implement it.

To move forward, proposals in the report will have to be taken on by separate bodies: the UC, the administration, and the faculty.

Judith H. Kidd, associate dean of the College and one of the ten members on the Dowling Committee, said her role will now be to encourage dialogue.

“The role that I would play is to make sure that the conversation continues,” she said.

Kidd advised that the UC open up discussion with the College.

UC President Andrea R. Flores ’10 said she is currently scheduling meetings with “the appropriate Deans.”

Many members of the executive board of the Council—including Flores—added that the UC needs to elicit student opinion on the matter before deciding its course of action.

Anthony R. Britt ’10 added that the report needs to be made “understandable” and “digestible” for regular students.

While members of the UC generally thought that it was important to address issues brought up in the report, some thought it was important to emphasize that the review would not be the Council’s sole focus for the semester.

“The report is good, but it isn’t going to be the huge issue that defines the UC this semester,” said Hysen.

—Staff writer Brittany M. Llewellyn can be reached at bllewell@fas.harvard.edu.

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