Students Take to the Internet To Express Discontent With Administration’s Cuts

Students across campus—generally stunned to hear of the extent of the budget cuts announced last Monday—aired their concerns over Harvard’s numerous e-mail lists, drafted petitions, and organized meetings to protest the planned reductions last week.

Whether with talk of the loss of hot breakfast, the reduced shuttle schedule, or the loss of library services at Hilles, House lists exploded last Monday and in the days that followed with student frustration over the cutbacks.

“I’m just confused about what happened to the age-old conventional wisdom: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Suffice to say, I’m disappointed. :-(,” wrote Cassandra B. Snow ’10 on Kirkland-list last Monday.

While threads about the loss of hot breakfast certainly proliferated on House lists, many seemed to take the loss of late night shuttle rides to the Radcliffe Quadrangle most seriously.

In a 1,033 word e-mail addressed to “The Harvard Community” and forwarded to numerous lists, Quad residents Logan R. Ury ’10 and Tessa K. Lyons-Laing ’11 wrote that cutting late night shuttles puts students in danger.

“[T]he cost of keeping Harvard students safe is never ‘unnecessary spending,’” they wrote. “To suggest that we stop whining and start walking is fine during daylight hours (and in warm months). But we constantly receive Community Advisories which alert us to the rising rates of violent crime against both men and women in the area.”

Ury is a former Crimson associate magazine editor.

George J.J. Hayward ’11, a Currier House Undergraduate Council representative, solicited e-mail responses immediately after the budget cut announcements from students in the Quad.

Within 48 hours he had received over 300 responses—that totalled 75 pages—from Quad residents, he said.

Hayward, who says he has surveyed Quad residents in the past, said this issue had the most response of any he had seen. From the responses Hayward said he found several overarching themes.

“Theme number one is safety,” he said. “Theme number two is that it looks like the Quad is getting screwed here. The Quad is now a satellite campus.”

The third theme, he said, was “students should have been consulted. A lot of these cuts are pretty poorly conceived.”

Hayward said he has been showing the responses to deans and House Masters.

“They’re getting read,” he said.

All three themes have also come up across the Houses’ e-mail lists.

Students have also been editing “Students Concerned for Harvard’s Future,” a wiki created by Amol K. Jain ’10 that allows students to voice their opinions on the budget cuts. More than 140 students have signed their name on the wiki saying that they are “concerned about the direction Harvard is headed and sympathize with a few or many of the perspectives on [the] site.”

House Committee chairs, student group leaders, and UC members are organizing a rally to voice student opinion about the budget cuts.

Council President Andrea R. Flores ’10, who helped to organize the event, said the discussion of budget cuts “really dominated the e-mail lists in a way I’d never seen before.”

But she said she has yet to come to conclusion as to her position on specific budget cuts.

“I’m supposed to represent everyone,” she said. “There’s too much of a diversity of opinion to say which issue I would support more than another. It’s not my job to have my own personal agenda on these.”

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