What’s the Point of a Survey Without Results?

First the Harvard Undergraduate Association wouldn’t let students vote. Now they’re apparently trying to cover up the results.

This month, the HUA’s inaugural Fall survey included three questions about Harvard’s definition of antisemitism and the University’s connections to companies operating in Israel. If you missed them, we don’t blame you – they were buried at the end of the Sports Team Officer ballot.

It doesn’t take a “problem solving team” to guess why. We’re disappointed by the Election Commission’s obvious obfuscation around questions about Israel-Palestine. Regardless of their position on these issues, students deserve a say.

Instead, the HUA and the Commission have taken practically every opportunity to prevent us from weighing in. The saga dates back to the spring of 2024, when the HUA approved a petition from the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee for a referendum on divestment from Israel. After receiving a series of offensive and inane question proposals, however, the HUA made the absurd decision to halt referenda altogether.

In the meantime, the HUA assembled an ironically-named “problem solving team” of five randomly selected undergraduates tasked with resolving the dispute. At the time, we argued that this reaction was farcical. Since then, the response hasn’t inspired any more confidence.

In collaboration with the problem-solving team, the HUA decided to limit student referenda to questions pertaining to the HUA itself and introduced a semesterly undergraduate survey to which student groups could submit questions.

Yet, this time around the link to the ballot simply read “Click Here to Vote for HUA Sports Officer” with only passing mention of the survey questions. Students then had to vote for a Sports Team Officer in order to proceed to the survey.

For those of us who made it through the survey — or anyone else for that matter — it wasn’t much easier to learn the results. The HUA Election Commission refused to publicly release the data in a normal format. They reported the percentage of students who supported divestment not as a proportion of the few survey respondents, but as a percentage of the entire student body.

In justifying this statistical malpractice, the Commission cited a policy against the public distribution of survey results. The only problem? That policy does not exist publicly in writing.

Full results of the survey were only distributed to the groups who submitted questions — along with a warning against releasing results in a “leading” manner (whatever that means). The public was only made aware of the full results when they were obtained by The Crimson.

Whether this fiasco of a survey process is the fault of administrators overseeing it or the Election Commission executing it, the impact is clear: Students were discouraged from weighing in on issues of moral salience to the Harvard community. Indeed, our Board has previously supported disclosing Harvard’s investments to ensure they’re made ethically.

The Election Commission needs serious reform, starting with designing a survey process that actually does what it’s supposed to — collect and publicize the voices of the student body. We also worry about the meddling of administrators in the process and believe the Commission should be free from their influence.

At the end of the day, the HUA and Election Commission should be in the business of responding to the student body’s views — not trying to cover them up.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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