Financial Scandal Taints Harvard Kennedy School Student Government Election

As Harvard Kennedy School holds its annual student government elections this week, a new scandal has taken center stage: the $46,000 budget deficit incurred by last year’s KSSG administration.

Lily Kang and Allan E. Cameron V, who are running in the election as a ticket, have made the budget deficit central to their campaign, discussing the issue at a presidential debate at HKS on Thursday and dedicating an entire section of their campaign website to addressing the deficit.

Kang and Cameron’s focus on the deficit — the largest in the group’s history — is a thinly veiled jab at Zubair Merchant, another presidential candidate who served as the executive vice president of KSSG last year.

At the debate last Thursday, Kang said that “it’s very important for the government to be accountable rather than shifting blames” after Merchant said that the Kennedy School’s Office of Students Services gave limited visibility into how funding was being distributed.

In an interview, Merchant said he was not involved in the management of KSSG’s finances as executive vice president and was preoccupied with other initiatives, including chartering buses to the Harvard-Yale game for HKS students and overseeing KSSG meetings.

“I was not on the finance committee. I was not the VP of finance. My job had nothing to do with finance,” Merchant said. “ I was the administrative backbone of the body.”

“The reason I was not on top of it is because my plate was so incredibly full of other things that I was doing for the student body, for the student government,” he added.

In a statement, Cameron wrote that he was “taken aback that the Executive Vice President, the second-most senior figure in KSSG, would not know about the finances of KSSG.”

But Alexander Y.C. Yang — a candidate for the vice president of internal affairs — defended Merchant, writing in a statement that “the deficit was not a result of his policies.”

“I think it’s important to note that Zubair was the executive vice president, not the vice president for finance,” Yang wrote. “We should remember that he was the uniting force in what was a really difficult year at HKS.”

Merchant added that if he were elected president of KSSG, he would be more focused on the student body’s finances and addressing the budget deficit — which he called “a priority this year.”

The debate over the budget deficit was sparked when an email sent in early September alerting former KSSG members of the budget deficit was circulated in a WhatsApp group chat with hundreds of HKS students, stirring up confusion and frustration on the eve of the KSSG elections.

The Kennedy School has waived part of the deficit but will require KSSG to establish a $10,000 reserve fund and to amend its bylaws to establish terms for using funds, according to HKS spokesperson Daniel B. Harsha.

Despite the tensions the budget deficit has caused among candidates, several Kennedy School students said the issue had not significantly altered how they plan to vote in the elections on Monday and Tuesday.

Anna F. Klingensmith, an HKS student, said that the budget deficit “isn’t something that was super influential in the way that I was thinking about voting.”

“When I’m voting, I care about someone who I believe has really good leadership skills, who I know super personally, someone I admire,” Klingensmith added.

Shanequa E. Moore, an independent candidate for KSSG executive vice president, said that she believed that while the budget deficit had consumed the attention of candidates, most HKS students were not as concerned about the issue.

“Pertaining to the deficit, I don’t think voters have really commented directly on it,” Moore said. “It’s been more of the candidates.”

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.