Student Leaders Plan Rally Against Budget Cut Process

Undergraduate student leaders met Friday to discuss a joint reaction to the sweeping budget cuts announced Monday by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The group agreed on a three-phase protest dubbed "We Are Harvard: Students, Staff, and Faculty for Transparency and Inclusion in Budget Cuts," which will take place before, during, and after the monthly Faculty meeting this Tuesday.

The administration is "still not being transparent," said Andrea R. Flores ’10, Undergraduate Council president, at the meeting.

Other than Flores, Institute of Politics President Mary K.B. Cox ’10, Harvard College Democrats Presidents Eva Z. Lam ’10, several UC members, and numerous House Committee chairs were in attendance.

The protest will begin with student group leaders—and possibly faculty or staff—handing out materials before the meeting starts. Then students who serve on student-faculty committees, and are thus allowed to attend the meeting, will pose questions to the faculty about budget cuts, according to the plan. Currently, the cuts are not on the Faculty meeting agenda.

At 5:15 p.m. the group plans to hold a larger rally outside University Hall, where the Faculty meeting will be in progress.

During the meeting, several students discussed methods to increase press coverage of the event to put more pressure on administrators.

"There are mainstream media outlets that care about this," said UC representative Eric N. Hysen ’11, "Now I think that’s something we can leverage."

"The best thing we can do is bring together students, staff, faculty, and alumni. If we can bring together all those forces, they will listen," he said.

Several students in attendance seemed optimistic that members of the Faculty would take their side in the struggle to give student voice more sway in College budget decisions.

A draft of an e-mail authored by several of the students in attendance and sent by Hysen, who is also an active Crimson IT editor, to the We—Are—Harvard Google group reads in part, "The recent cuts announced by Dean Smith reflect the top-down process by which these decisions were made. Broad community input would have alerted the administration to the serious issues that have been raised with many of these cuts. Decisions to reduce shuttle service, close the Quad library, cut hot breakfast, increase section sizes, and slash House budgets were made without real input from the communities affected by these cuts. Going forward, we are concerned that this pattern will continue as future cuts are announced over the summer and into the fall, when student input will be even more limited than during these first round of cuts."

A Facebook event initially hosted by Flores and now hosted by "Harvard Students, Faculty, and Staff" has been created for the rally. HoCo chairs said they also plan to ask their House Masters to take part.

Flores, who said she had initially expected "primarily administrative cuts" to be announced last Monday, said before the meeting that the strong student reaction to the budget cuts is being met with little response from administrators.

"[Students] are realizing that no matter how many petitions they’re doing or e-mails they write... they’re not getting any sort of response," she said. "Even though we’re the consumers of the education, we’re not able to give feedback."

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