HUA Funds Declaration Day, Discusses Joint DSO Initiatives at Weekly Meeting

The Harvard Undergraduate Association allocated $5,000 for its annual Concentration Declaration Day event and shared plans for collaborations with the Dean of Students Office on voter engagement and intellectual vitality initiatives during a Tuesday evening meeting.

This year’s Declaration Day event, scheduled for Friday, will feature a concentration advising session in Harvard Hall before students gather in Tercentenary Theatre to take pictures with concentration banners, according to HUA Academic Team Officer Matthew R. Tobin ’27.

Tobin, a Crimson Editorial editor, said the advising session — a new feature of the event this year — will give students who are unsure about their concentration an opportunity to chat with concentration advisors before declaring.

“If you’re a sophomore and you’re still thinking about what you want to declare, this is the perfect time — and also like the last time — to figure that out,” Tobin said.

The HUA voted to approve a proposal by the academic team for $5,000 of the team’s budget to be allocated toward the event, which Tobin called “very similar” to the cost of last year’s event.

“The primary cost is pizza for the celebration,” Tobin said. “We just get tons and tons of pizza so that everyone can enjoy a lunch while they’re declaring.”

During the meeting, HUA Co-Presidents Ashley C. Adirika ’26 and Jonathan Haileselassie ’26 said they met with Dean of Students Thomas Dunne about potential voter engagement initiatives, including a voting drive at the Head of the Charles Regatta and a “joint video with the DSO encouraging students to vote.”

According to Haileselassie, the co-presidents and Dunne also discussed several potential initiatives to promote intellectual vitality — a College initiative intended to increase free expression on Harvard’s campus — such as “encouraging student conversations” and “tracking intellectual engagement via surveys and anecdotes.”

“So essentially, ‘How do we go about encouraging students to have conversations? How do we track to see whether the initiatives and the things that we’re putting into place are actually working?’” Haileselassie said.

At Tuesday’s meeting, officers also discussed the approaching Oct. 10 deadline for student organizations to apply for HUA funding. Extracurricular Team Officer Joel O. Crawford ’26 said the extracurricular team has begun reviewing applications, but that there is currently no projected date when clubs will receive funding decisions.

Haileselassie noted that the HUA will be hiring an “independent audit reviewer” to remove bias from the HUA’s review of club funding requests.

“We’ll be hiring a grad student to take out some of the bias from the process and to make this grant review of student organizations as efficient as possible,” Haileselassie said. Adirika and Haileselassie declined to provide further details regarding the hiring process after the meeting.

Residential Life Team Officer Sophia F. He ’27 said she met with Harvard University Dining Services to voice students’ desires for extension of dinner hours and hot breakfast in the Radcliffe Quadrangle.

However, she said HUDS told her that dining policies for this year could not be changed due to a “practical timeline restraint.”

“They decide next year’s budget in March, so the budget for this year is already allocated and they are not open to making any changes,” He said, adding that HUDS plans to send a survey collecting feedback on “tradeoffs” students would be willing to make for changes like hot breakfast in the Quad.

—Staff writer Adithya V. Madduri can be reached at adithya.madduri@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @adithyavmadduri.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.