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The Institute of Politics’ Student Advisory Committee will decide Monday whether to adopt a co-president model, hoping to settle a constitutional issue that has divided leaders of one of Harvard’s largest student organizations.
The governance reform is central to the platform of incoming president Lorenzo Z. Ruiz ’27 and vice president William M. Smialek ’27, who were elevated after an uncontested election last month. But it has raised the hackles of former and current SAC members who say the change would be undemocratic and disrupt the organization’s chain of command.
Monday will not be the first time the IOP has debated the issue. Last Saturday, IOP treasurer Kevin Bokoum ’26 sent an urgent email to the 42-person Student Advisory Committee to clear their calendars for Tuesday at 8 p.m.
The IOP Constitution was under scrutiny by the Dean of Students Office, Bokoum warned, and required an “immediate update” lest the organization face “additional sanctions.”
“This will be a short meeting,” Bokoum predicted.
The call was anything but. Over two and a half hours, the meeting devolved into a dispute over the co-presidency issue, with SAC members alleging Bokoum’s amendment was a covert attempt to stop Ruiz and Smialek from altering the leadership structure once in office.
Though one half of the proposed amendment — language that clarified the various positions and responsibilities within the IOP — was necessary to address the DSO warning, Bokoum tacked on an additional stipulation: any future governance changes would need three-quarters of SAC support, rather than the current two-thirds threshold, and could not be made in the middle of a term.
Students at the meeting were skeptical of the rider, speculating that Bokoum was “clearly trying to force through a prevention of the co-presidency but under the facade of the DSO’s existing claim,” said SAC member Dev Ahuja ’27, the chair of the IOP Governance Lab.
“The second half of it was clearly an ulterior motive. It was clearly going after this co-presidency,” said Ahuja, who opposes the co-presidency plan but said he found the meeting “ridiculous.”
Eventually, Bokoum agreed to separate the amendment into two parts. The technical, DSO-mandated changes passed smoothly. As debate wore on, members dropped off the call. By the time the second part was put to a vote, only half of SAC was present in the meeting. The amendment drew support from more than half of the remaining attendees but narrowly failed to clear a two-thirds supermajority.
Bokoum stood by his decision to propose the amendment in its entirety in a Sunday statement, calling it “one comprehensive fix” that “provided stability in the most basic structure of IOP leadership.”
“Amendments are devised in accordance with what is good policy,” Bokoum added. “I maintain that a higher vote threshold to change the relationship between SAC, Exec, and our general membership is good policy.”
Though Tuesday’s saga resolved the DSO warnings, it clarified little else. The remainder will be resolved on Monday, when SAC will vote explicitly on the co-presidency and conduct a revote on the three-quarters threshold for future amendments, according to a Friday SAC email.
Former SAC member Andrew J. Zonneveld ’26, who oversaw the uncontested election of Smialek and Ruiz, was critical of their push for a co-presidency — a proposal that was never subject to a public vote.
“It would have been great if we actually had contested elections, and then they could argue that people voted for their platform, which included the co-presidency model,” Zonneveld said. “But that just didn’t happen.”
Because most of the SAC is also appointed rather than elected, Zonneveld said the governance decision was being taken out of the hands of IOP members.
“To change the way that elections are held, and to touch the structure of the executive members, without any sort of input from students in a more substantive way — I find that to be the most concerning issue,” he said. “We’re changing the constitution when no one in that room was elected besides six of them.”
In a statement, Ruiz and Smialek wrote that the co-presidency change would make IOP leadership more equitable and align IOP governance with other large campus organizations, like the Harvard Undergraduate Association.
“Ultimately, our goal has always been to chart a course toward fairer and more distributed leadership for the future — and that will continue to be an ongoing conversation,” they wrote in a statement.
Incoming SAC member Samantha Ruazol, who will take over the Fellows and Study Group program, said she wasn’t aware of Ruiz and Smialek’s plan until this week. Because new SAC members lacked the “institutional knowledge” of the organization’s structure, she supported the decision to hold a vote immediately, rather than under Ruiz and Smialek’s tenure.
“They should have the deciding vote for this, just because they’ve operated under the vice president structure, and have a sense of how those dynamics work, and whether or not moving to a co-presidency is even beneficial,” Ruazol said of the current SAC.
If the co-presidency proposal was hidden, it was hidden in plain sight. Smialek and Ruiz included their plan to reform the presidency on a policy one-pager distributed to The Crimson at the time of their election. And in a November interview, Ruiz said he and Smialek were proposing the reform to create a “more democratic and more accessible” IOP.
Smialek, at the time, said the two had consulted with multiple different previous executive teams who supported the transition. He said the current structure left the vice president without designated responsibility.
“It kind of leaves the vice president being like, ‘Where do they fit in? Where is their corner? Where is their niche? What is their specialty?’” Smialek said in the November interview.
Even so, Zonneveld said the IOP should reflect the structure of real-world governments, rather than their peer organizations at Harvard.
“I know it works for other clubs, and I’m sure it works for them, and it’s more fair and equitable, but like — this is politics, baby,” Zonneveld said. “You just have to suck it up and deal with it.”
Zonneveld said he was also concerned that the proposal, which leaves the IOP without a single leader at the top, would leave co-presidents with no clear way to settle disagreements.
“What happens when the next co-presidents aren’t best friends?” Zonneveld said. “My perspective is very much future-oriented of ‘What is the IOP going to look like in 10 years if this happens?’”
—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.
