On a snowy December night, the Harvard Undergraduate Council hosted the inauguration of James Mathew ’21 and Ifeoma White-Thorpe ’21 — the president-elect and vice president-elect of the UC. The ceremony was the main event of the evening; speeches and swearing-ins marked a celebratory, symbolic transfer of power from the UC’s previous leadership to Mathew and White-Thorpe. However, it also underscored the unique challenges the duo will face over the next two semesters. The last UC election directly called the organization’s legitimacy into question, with calls for the body to be dissolved. Diversity within the UC and its ability to engage with students directly have, in the eyes of its leaders, contributed to negative perceptions of the Council. Even internally, challenges include the simple matter of attendance. Mathew and White-Thorpe face a campus that is questioning whether it needs an Undergraduate Council at all.
Members of the Undergraduate Council and other observers take their seats as the December 2 meeting begins.
Issues of Legitimacy
November’s UC Presidential Election saw two candidates, Aditya Dhar ’21 and Andrew Liang ’21, run on a platform centered around abolishing the UC. Dhar and Liang won the largest number of first-choice votes, but under the ranked-choice voting system employed by the UC Election Commission, they did not earn enough points to beat out Mathew and White-Thorpe. Dhar and Liang earned 1,063 first-choice votes, while Mathew and White-Thorpe earned 1,025. However, the winning ticket secured 1938.0 points, edging out Dhar and Liang who received 1,865.8. Though they were unsuccessful, the possibility that Dhar and Liang might have been successful and gained enough student support to abolish the UC seemed salient as the UC’s outgoing president and vice-president delivered speeches focused on attitudes towards the UC.
In her farewell speech to Council, outgoing vice president Julia Huesa ‘20 described how her experience has shown her that the UC can be “an intimidating and sometimes even thankless organization to be a part of.” Outgoing president Sruthi Palaniappan ’20 explicitly mentioned the need to further “legitimize the UC” and told the convened members that “for others to take the UC seriously, first we need to take the UC seriously.” Critical to this goal, she continued, would be to ensure that the student body is aware of the importance of the tasks that the UC handles, such as “funding organizations each week, … saving shopping week, providing subsidized summer storage, and putting forward a host of important initiatives.”
Julia Huesa ‘20, outgoing vice president, delivers a farewell address to the assembled UC members.
In a brief interview with the HPR, when asked about the issues of legitimacy facing the UC as it prepares for the upcoming semester, Palaniappan asserted that “students on and off the Council need to treat it seriously in order to get administrators to think of the UC as a legitimate organization.” She added that it might also have the added benefit of increasing the legitimacy of the organization in the eyes of students if it were treated as legitimate by Harvard’s administration. She reiterated the importance of communication in increasing the UC’s legitimacy, especially to demonstrate more clearly to students that the UC is actively working on the issues facing them and that its decisions have tangible impacts on their experiences at Harvard.
Sruthi Palaniappan ’20, outgoing president, delivers her farewell address to the UC.
Palaniappan believes Dhar and Liang’s ticket was intended to be humorous, but recognizes that its substantial support reveals the general apathy or active distaste of the student body towards the UC. Despite this, Palaniappan does not seem to believe that their campaign poses a threat to the actual existence of the UC. She summarizes the position of students she interacted with who voted for the pair, as “the UC has been doing more than ever before but … wouldn’t it be funny if the joke ticket won?”
James Mathew ’21 is sworn as president of the UC by Dean Katherine O’Dair.
For Mathew, the relative success of Dhar and Liang’s campaign also represents a legitimacy concern that must be addressed. “The student body [will be] more engaged, more aware of what the UC is doing … when it’s not something that’s so distant from them,” Mathew said to the HPR. However, he shares Palaniappan’s view that the UC does not have to worry about a significant contingent of students actively supporting the abolition of the UC and that the students who voted for Dhar and Liang likely enjoyed the “humor of it” more than anything else. He did acknowledge the possibility that a minority of voters for that ticket did legitimately vote for Dhar and Liang because they perceive the UC as ineffective, something that he believes needs to be rectified through communication.
The UC Has An Attendance Problem
This past term, the UC actively attempted to improve the attendance of its members at meetings. In its Mid-Year Report, the Undergraduate Council acknowledged concerns about attendance. It claimed that “representatives that did not leave the council averaged 1.75 unexcused absences and 0.86 that were excused,” asserting that this was a 16% decrease in unexcused absences and a 41% decrease in overall absences compared to the previous semester (Spring 2019), which was an anomaly due to changes in UC policies regarding excused absences. In Spring 2019, only two members of the then 46-member UC attended every meeting, including general meetings like the one on December 2 and smaller committee meetings devoted to specific issues.
Despite having a more pronounced role within the UC than rank-and-file members, the attendance problem seems to have expanded to committee chairs, who are charged with leading their fellow student legislators in specific issue areas. At the beginning of the meeting, the chairs of each committee were asked to update the rest of the Council on their progress, but two of the six committee chairs were not in attendance. Attendance information obtained by Luke Albert ‘22 reveals that 11 members were absent without an excuse at the December 2 meeting. Additionally, some members of the Undergraduate Council missed as many as 9 meetings — general meetings and committee meetings–without presenting any valid excuse.
In an interview with the HPR, when asked about the UC’s problems with attendance, White-Thorpe spoke of a general problem within the Council of “maintaining membership,” especially at the end of each semester, something that she has noted with increasing concern over the past few years. As she and Mathew plan for the upcoming semester, they have set their sights on improving attendance at meetings and ensuring regular participation of those elected to the body. “We want to incentivize people to stay on the UC and to be changemakers,” White-Thorpe noted. She acknowledged that sometimes there is a benefit to members cycling out since it makes space for new people and the new ideas they bring with them. But, she was also aware of the value of institutional memory and how attendance issues that evolve into people leaving the UC pose a challenge to that. The key is, in White-Thorpe’s view, to work with the current Undergraduate Council to ensure that its members and the student body recognize “the UC as a necessary outlet for them to make change.”
Restructuring the UC for Diversity
A critical component of the Mathew and White-Thorpe campaign, as well as many others, was renewing the UC’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Other campaigns strongly featured proposals for increasing support to first-generation students, establishing a multicultural center, and supporting undocumented students. Mathew and White-Thorpe, however, resolved to change the structure of the UC itself in order to make it more inclusive. In addition to those representatives elected by the student body, the president-elect and vice president-elect want to “create a representative body of student group leaders to incorporate into the UC caucus system.”
Ifeoma “Ify” White Thorpe ‘21 is sworn in as vice president of the UC by Dean Alexander Miller.
To both Mathew and White-Thorpe, the creation of a more diverse and representative governing body is quintessential to the UC’s legitimacy. White-Thorpe sees the goal of the caucus system as a way to empower students of all backgrounds and identities by bringing them “into the fold of the UC so that they can actually see what’s happening and to ensure that their voices are being heard.”
At present, the UC currently has a system of internal caucuses that seek to represent the concerns of marginalized groups on campus. The problem with this, according to White-Thorpe, is that these caucuses are “only composed of [existing] members of the UC.” Mathew and White-Thorpe would want to devolve power to community leaders within the student body by extending caucus membership to students that represent various groups at Harvard. For example, under their plan, a black students’ caucus might have representation from student groups that serve and provide spaces for black students on campus. These students would “work hand-in-hand with elected members of the UC” to introduce legislation and craft statements, among other tasks to ensure that the UC is truly representing a diverse group of interests.
As was clear from its meeting on December 2, the UC will have to work to serve a student body that, at best, does not seem to take it seriously or, at worst, is actively hostile towards the UC as an institution. Furthermore, the month of March saw Harvard undergraduates asked to return to their homes around the world in light of COVID-19. The UC’s leadership this term must contend with the additional concern of ensuring the UC’s own members and the student body continue to support it and believe in its efficacy. However, that will have to happen in spite of the physical distance that now stands between the UC and those it intends to represent. The task before Mathew and White-Thorpe is no small one. However, they are uniquely positioned to address the issues posed by distance and diversity and, if they are effective in their plans to restructure the UC, they may end their term with more student support than what they started with.
Image Source: Facebook / Harvard Undergraduate Council // Ajay Sarma