Just months into serving her first term as an Undergraduate Council representative, she was fed up.
“It’s a lot of jumping through hoops and trying to work in the system to make change happen,” a junior, hereinafter referred to with the pseudonym Chen, said. “I quit because I primarily just didn’t want to spend my time at Harvard doing what the UC was undertaking.”
She’s not alone—last year, nine UC representatives left the council before the end of their terms. The previous year, three representatives stepped down and two more were expelled during the fall term for poor attendance. Additionally, many representatives every year choose not to run for re-election once they do finish their terms. For instance, of the 41 freshmen and sophomores elected last year either in the fall or through the special elections, just 16 sit on the council this year—seven left before the end of their term last year, and only 25 of 41 sought re-election.
According to the UC Constitution, a full body would consist of the President, Vice President, and 49 representatives—three members from each residential house; three from each of the four freshman yards; generally one representative from Dudley House. Why are there so many turnovers in a popularly elected body of students, whose candidate pool is entirely self-selected? The reason, at least partially, seems to lie within the UC: despite the victories that the UC has achieved in recent years, it has by many accounts struggled internally with efficiency and externally with perceived legitimacy—or lack thereof.
Dreams and Disillusionment
The mid-year special election usually fills UC seats for three reasons, according to current vice president and senior Sietse Goffard: first, UC committee chairs’ terms run from December to December, putting them up for reelection after the first semester. Second, the fall general elections sometimes fail to produce a full delegation for a given house or yard. And then there are those who decide to step down from the UC.
Chen ended up resigning after the fall semester. She acknowledges that part of the blame falls on her for underestimating the time and effort the UC would require but stresses that the underlying cause was the UC’s bureaucratic, procedural requirements.
“[Serving on the UC is] a tough, thankless job,” she said. “Oftentimes the jumping through hoops is just a frustrating thing to have to be a part of especially if you’re at the point where you’re trying to figure out what’s going on, and that leads to a lot of disillusionment.”
Similar disillusionment led another former representative, hereinafter referred to pseudonymously as Payal, to pass up running for reelection. Now a junior, he aligned himself with the now-defunct Crimson Coalition during his run in freshman year. The Coalition was a group that sought to overhaul the UC, make it more effective, and tackle broader issues beyond the scope of what the UC is typically known for, issues with “more of an impact,” like divestment, sexual assault, and recycling, to name a few.
“People will vote for or come in—like I did—with grandiose ideas of what the UC can accomplish and realize that this isn’t necessarily the case,” he explained. “I was disillusioned by the fact that people seemed interested but less than committed to taking on those issues once I got there, and that we were not mobilizing people in a way that was going to get the administration to listen on those issues.”
Now more involved with other organizations, he said he has found these other organizations to be more effective avenues for change. “I don’t want to categorize all of us,” he said, “but I find at least for me that advocating for [these big issues] from the outside tends to be the better way to accomplish them.”
The recent presidential ticket comprised of sophomores Luke Heine and Stephen Turban brought up this “attrition rate,” as they put it, at the Crimson Crossfire debate. The UC, they said, is weakened by a lack of group bonding and by its unnecessarily formal procedural rules. In a later interview, Stephen attributed the council’s turnover to poor structure: “We have very little tradition, very little structure that relates directly to inter-group bonding.”
Change Is Slow
What was clear from the HPR’s conversations with all the presidential tickets this past election cycle is that they care about the UC—how it’s run, what it does, and how it’s received and perceived. But whether the incoming president and vice president, juniors Ava Nasrollazadeh and Dhruv Goyal, can or will really accomplish their platform’s deliverables depends in large part on the Council’s legitimacy, and, relatedly, on its relationships with both students and the administration.
Senior Sam Clark, who with current UC president and senior Gus Mayopoulos, successfully ran a joke campaign last year, said that neither he nor Gus paid any attention to the UC up until their campaign. Junior Ema Horvath, one of this year’s vice presidential candidates, admitted that she used to belong to the non-voting bloc as well. Last year, though, is what made a difference in her perception of the UC.
It’s no secret that Clark and Mayopoulos’ campaign shook up the UC last year. Running on the platform of Tomato Basil Ravioli soup every day, thicker toilet paper, and divestment from gender-neutral weekend shuttles—a “bastardization of all these different student causes,” as Clark puts it—they managed to capture a plurality of the vote, ignite a debate over the UC’s legitimacy, and capture student attention.
In the year that has elapsed since then, the unlikely combination of Mayopoulos and Goffard—Goffard was elected vice president as Clark resigned and Mayopoulos constitutionally assumed the position of president—has, by many accounts, brought greater legitimacy to the UC in the eyes of not just students and administrators but also council members.
“With Gus and Sietse—the odd couple where they sort of got forced into it—it has worked out remarkably well, and it’s been great,” said junior Meghamsh Kanuparthy, the presidential candidate that ran with Horvath. “Buy-in is much better.”
Setbacks and disillusionment, though, seem inevitable.
“People here are very busy,” said Goffard. “Sometimes people join the UC and realize it may not be 100% the place for them. It’s hard to change that, and it’s always going to be a reality.”
As a result, according to Mayopoulos, decreasing turnover within the Council is a function of legitimizing the organization and what it means to be a representative.
“UC will continue to [have to] do a nice job of impressing upon people that when you’re elected to represent other people, it’s a serious decision to run and to accept that responsibility,” he said. “Even though it’s just student government [and] no one’s trying to say it’s the end of the world if you don’t do your job, if you’re agreeing to be the voice for other people, you should be the best voice you can.”
Ultimately, change is slow. “It’s always going to be hard to get things changed,” Gus said, “especially at an institution like Harvard that’s so conservative and has done so well over such a long period of time and doesn’t really see the need for change. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.”
A New Era?
The past election saw a little over half of the student body vote, a turnout rate slightly up from 47 percent last year. Even fewer students vote in the election for House and Yard representatives in the fall. “Most students don’t vote, so in a similar way to the midterm elections for Congress, the people who are representing you aren’t necessarily representative of the whole student body,” Payal told the HPR. “It in part becomes a contest of popularity.”
The unyielding truth is that the UC still hasn’t captured the legitimacy and relevance it seeks. But it has certainly made progress in approachability and relevance this year due to the work of Mayopoulos and Goffard, and it’s up to all Nasrollazadeh and Goyal to continue that momentum. For their part, Mayopoulos and Goffard are optimistic about the UC’s future.
In the warmth of Ticknor lounge one chilly Sunday in November, representatives convened for their weekly general meeting. Dressed in his admiral-style costume, Gus delivered the usual announcements. As he talked about the scheduling of their next few meetings around Thanksgiving and reading period, he mentioned in passing that he and Sietse had just a few meetings left, a comment met with a loud chorus of aww.
“My goal was a person like me should never be able to win a UC election again,” Gus said, referring to his complete inexperience. “This organization should be seen as a worthwhile institution. To be clear, it has always been a worthwhile institution. But I wanted to make it clear going forward that students knew the UC was fighting for them.”