In just a few weeks, the holy mess that is student elections will consume many of Harvard’s largest organizations. Whether it’s called running or applying or shooting, elections find ambitious students in their most restless attempts at innovation and creativity. Familiar buzzwords like “change,” “diversity,” and “community,” unsurprisingly resurface to fill the brisk autumn air and Lamont and Ticknor, where candidates often hold sparsely attended “office hours.” It’s sometimes hard to watch these all-too-intense student elections without a suspicion of insincerity. A certain sense of disillusionment has resigned us all to the belief that the wheel will only continue rolling the same way it has been, just to bring the same issues back to the table come next year.
I’ll start out with an embarrassing bit of honesty. When I came to Harvard two years ago as the industrious freshman that I was, I thought I would someday like to be the president of the Institute of Politics. For the last two years, I’ve diligently played by the rules. I rose through subcommittee after subcommittee to eventually chair the Fellows and Study Groups committee, and I’ve spent enough time in the Kennedy School complex to befriend the security guard that mans the entrance used during off-hours. So earlier this fall, when I was moved by something unknown inside of me to decide not to run in the IOP elections this year, I felt disarrayed and conflicted.
I write this article with the utmost care and love for the place that I call my second home at Harvard, in order to share the realization that’s helped me come to terms with why I no longer want to run: the IOP is not a student organization.
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On one level, I have learned more from the IOP in the past two years than from any class or professional experience. Through the study groups and JFK Jr. Forums that the Institute hosts, I have heard from more heads of state, governors, and members of Congress than I can count with all my fingers and toes twice over. But looking back at my intellectual progress at Harvard, I give more credit to the Social Studies 10 syllabus and Roberto Unger than to the IOP for being able to constructively, structurally, and systematically criticize my surroundings.
Throughout the past semester and a half that I’ve served on the student board of the IOP, I have realized with frustration that resistance to deep reform—both at the IOP and in the political world more broadly—is structurally and ideologically engrained in the way that the IOP operates. While the IOP’s way of engaging students constantly pushes and inspires us to find ways to spin the wheel faster and more efficiently, we are rarely, if ever, dared to rethink how the wheel itself is made.
The IOP functions under a tight partnership between the full-time staff and student leaders. At the beginning of each semester, any significant ideas that come out of the student board retreat go to the staff for approval, and the chairs of each of the Institute’s programs apply for an allocated budget to the staff finance director. Students at the IOP are not permitted to fundraise by themselves for any IOP-related projects, nor are programs allowed to make their own “gear” such as t-shirts and fleeces. (To make an important distinction, the HPR is an exception, since it sells advertisements and subscriptions to make revenue, does not have line items on its budget pre-approved by the IOP, and can make its own merchandise.) The money is already there, and the ways to spend it are already worked into the system via line item approvals. This protocol, while logistically innocuous, is a symbol for the spirit of complacency that dominates the place.
While I can see many reasons to create a student-run alternative to the IOP, I am not surprised that no one has done so. Politics at Harvard is like a ball pit full of enticing perks—the big-shot speakers, the internship opportunities, the food—that make it hard to imagine a ball pit that’s better. From the start, freshmen are encouraged to simply accept the fancy, staid system, stifling any real sense of creativity or fresh thinking surrounding how else our Institute of Politics could be. There is rarely a sense of “making” at the IOP, let alone making from scratch.
This lack of creativity also permeates the IOP’s programming. There is a reason why many of our direct-service-minded friends at the Philips Brooks House Association would never come to a study group (and most Forums) even if they were paid to do so. Although both organizations operate under the mission of spreading the spirit of public service, our demographics and even the way that each organization interprets “public service” are wildly different. While the PBHA has its own challenges, it is true that the IOP is often viewed from the outside as no more than “that place,” in a reservedly side-eyed way.
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I love politics because there is no set definition for what it entails: it is a truly malleable word defined solely by how people choose to organize their society. The IOP, however, has given “politics” a narrower definition at Harvard. Within the confines of the IOP, politics is the two-party system and success is a long career that is impactful yet consistent with the maintenance of the status quo. I wonder if part of the whole problem might be that the students who do community-rooted work on the ground are either not inclined or not necessarily invited to participate.
None of the solutions to combat this have worked particularly well. Valiant efforts like a new race and ethnicity initiative—weekly sessions in which students discuss the intersection of politics and identity—have certainly started a discussion, but they remain within the universe of “politics” as the IOP has defined it. We can place very little blame on the students who have been “running” the IOP; rather, fault lies with the existence of the IOP as it is.
This is the realization—that at the end of the day, the IOP is not a student organization—that led me to come to terms with my sudden drop in ambition to lead the place I so love.
The IOP is a place that embodies “politics” in the way that it’s defined it. The money, the connections, the Kennedy name, the “system”: these are all things within which the IOP propagates its brand of public service. While all of these things prepare us well to enter the elite politics of the real world, they are far from the things that would lead us to raise even fundamental doubts about the way that we have organized our governments and communities. And if we don’t raise these doubts in the intellectual luxury of college, where and when will we?
There was a long period of deliberation and thought behind even the act of expressing this opinion. But I write this article today, as I’ve repeated many times, because I care about the Institute, its members, and most importantly, what public service and politics look like on our campus.
Come the election in approximately three weeks, I challenge all those running and voting to give the ideas in this article thought. Access to the IOP is a privilege we should cherish, and it is our job to constantly put it under the most rigorous review.
Photo Credits: Ed Uthman, Flickr.com; Anne Roth, Flickr.com