UC Sets Presidential Election Timeline

The Undergraduate Council passed a proposed electoral timeline for its upcoming presidential race with two abstentions at the Council’s general meeting on Sunday.

Candidates for UC president and vice president must submit their intent to run by midnight on Sunday, Nov. 1—exactly two weeks from Sunday’s meeting. Additionally, the declared candidates must submit petitions with at least 150 student signatures by the following day.

Candidates will be allowed to begin campaigning on Nov. 10 at 12:01 a.m., with voting opening the following Monday, Nov. 16. The voting period is set to close on Thursday, Nov. 19, and results will be announced that evening.

Campaign rules for this year’s presidential elections are identical to those of last year’s.

Also at the meeting, members of the Honor Council, part of the College’s new honor code, briefed UC representatives on the purpose of the Honor Council and solicited advice on how the two bodies can collaborate in the future.

“Academic excellence is meaningless without integrity,” said Daniel V. Banks ’17, the UC’s Student Initiatives Committee Chair and the only UC representative to serve on the Honor Council.

According to Jonathan G. Jeffrey ’16, another member of the Honor Council, one of the group’s main responsibilities on campus is to “reach out to the community” about academic integrity and to try and create an honest culture throughout Harvard College.

“I think the UC would be a tremendous help to us,” Jeffrey said. “It would be a… great partnership.

In other business, the Council voted unanimously to allocate $1,000 from the Student Initiatives Committee’s budget toward an event for sophomores to celebrate choosing their concentrations.

At the meeting, Lowell House representative Berkeley Brown ’18 and Winthrop House representative Madeleine H. Stern ’18 said they saw a sharp decline in the amount of student programming from their freshman to sophomore years at the College.

As part of an effort to ramp up sophomore programming efforts, Brown and Stern received funding from the UC, the Advising Programs Office, the Harvard Alumni Association, and the Office of the Dean of the College for the event, which is scheduled to occur in Annenberg Hall on Nov. 13, the day following the sophomore concentration declaration deadline.

The two said that they seek to continue the increased effort to plan class-wide events for sophomores, adding that they eventually hope to create a body similar to the First-Year Social Committee for second-year programming.