Shopping week (n): a free-for-all course selection perquisite simultaneously enjoyed and reviled by Harvard students that has come under recent review by the Harvard faculty. In March 2018, the Harvard faculty started discussions to change from shopping week to a preregistration structure. Faculty members say that the term “shopping” itself inspires a consumerist behavior, that they are not sure how many students to expect in class, and that teaching fellows experience unpredictable assignment patterns. A committee was established to further investigate alternatives to course registration at Harvard.
Students responded strongly to these proposed changes: In October 2018, the Harvard Undergraduate Council, dedicated to representing and supporting the Harvard College undergraduate student population, conducted a survey to collect data on student opinions about shopping week. The results were striking, garnering 1,883 student responses and an overwhelming show of support for shopping week. Around the same time, Amanda Claybaugh announced that the committee would host three listening sessions throughout October. In December, Claybaugh questioned her understanding of the issue, now unsure if the committee would vote to get rid of shopping week.
This is an example of student agency at its finest. While there is no set definition for student agency, experts generally agree that the term refers to students setting and initiating progress toward goals. In the case of shopping week, the UC was able to rally a considerable student response to the faculty’s proposal to change registration by speaking out in support of the current system. Almost one third of students responded to the survey put out by the Undergraduate Council, and students provided anecdotes at the listening sessions. Claybaugh’s initial proposal would have been implemented in the fall of 2020, but has now been postponed until 2022.
When student agency is done right, the impact can be broad and influential. This is an issue that affects all students directly, and many students had strong feelings about it. However, this is not true for all student movements on campus, and many struggle to be heard by the administration. Further, administrators find it hard to make time to listen to everyone who needs their attention. The UC functions as an intermediary between students and administrators, and given its role in the shopping week controversy, is important for student agency on campus. Harvard administrators need to develop systems that encourage more student agency, and the UC can play a vital role in this process.
Representation in Practice
“Harvard is a very disorganized place,” said Sruthi Palaniappan, president of the Harvard UC, in an interview with the HPR. “It’s such a fragmented institution where you might not always know who to go to with what or who controls what, and I think that from a student perspective, it can be especially challenging to understand who the key decision makers are.”
It is no secret that Harvard is a bureaucratic institution. In an earlier HPR article,“Bureaucracy Meets Controversy,” Jacob Blair explored the implications of this complex system for students trying to navigate conversations with the administration. Palaniappan echoed the article’s concerns about students’ widespread confusion over which administrators they should be talking to.
“Things are done very slowly and meticulously, and sometimes I understand it; other times it just seems frustrating because you don’t get any response. They keep redirecting you to other people who supposedly control these areas, but they redirect you to somewhere else. It’s a chase. It’s a bureaucratic place to navigate.”
Palaniappan finds it especially difficult for members of the UC to enact change that will impact students in the long term. She acknowledged that students and administrators have a relationship that is on a four-year timer, so it can be hard to push for meaningful change in that time. She said that the UC struggles with institutional memory, and that it is hard to inform newly elected representatives about past conversations with the administration. However, Palaniappan said that “admin will often cite conversations that happened five years ago as reason for not being able to push something forth now.”
Palaniappan said that students do not have the structures in place to pass on information between student generations. Institutional memory is an issue for almost all student groups, but especially damages student government. Members of the UC build relationships with administrators directly which, because of committee shuffling and high turnover rates, can be short-lived. The result is that representatives may repeat meetings on topics that administrators have already had conversations about with a previous student.
The UC has also struggled to be viewed as a legitimate voice for the student body. “[Students] might believe that certain people in the UC were elected with only one vote, or whatever it might be, that doesn’t help the case of the organization as being representative of the entire student body,” recounted Palaniappan.
However, she also said that “in order for the UC to be a very legitimate body, both students and admin need to start taking the UC more legitimately, because they reinforce each other … Students need to treat the UC as the legitimate body that it is, because otherwise we’re unable to advocate for things that groups come to us about, because students haven’t been a part of lending us this type of legitimacy.”
In order for the UC to obtain legitimacy, the student body must also leverage the organization’s agency. For the UC to make change on campus, a greater number of students have to believe in its ability to do so. The abolition of shopping week was postponed until 2022 in part because a large number of students participated in the UC’s survey, as well as the Harvard-sponsored listening sessions. The shopping week controversy modeled what UC and administrative collaboration could potentially look like, yet also highlighted the existing shortcomings of current administrative practices.
An Administrative Perspective
The Harvard College administration has often had a hard time addressing the issues that students face. Students often assume that the administration and faculty act in their own interest, but in reality students are at the forethought of every decision. In an interview with the HPR, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh said that “when you look at the most contentious issues that come before the faculty, it’s often arguments about what’s best for students.”
Claybaugh also described the structure of Harvard’s administration, putting President Bacow at the top and then branching off to the deans of Harvard College, who each oversee different responsibilities for the College. Claybaugh said that due to this model, “there is no person in this system who has the final power. It can be confusing trying to figure out who has the leverage.” This echoes Palaniappan’s point that it can be hard to navigate Harvard’s bureaucratic structure. Moreover, in addition to delegation among the College deans, responsibilities are also distributed to student-faculty committees.
Students sit on many of the committees at the College, including the Committee on Undergraduate Education and the Education Policy Committee. The most important issues at the College are delegated to these committees, which research and propose solutions. However, Claybaugh noted that “it takes a year to get [an issue] through one of these committees.” The slowness of the committees is intentional, and Claybaugh described it as a “mixed blessing,” noting that it “enables deliberation” because “you can’t immediately change things.”
But another side effect of this slow-moving governance process is that students feel like they are being excluded from the process. Claybaugh noted that because the administration takes longer to make decisions than it takes students to graduate, students feel as though they are not being consulted. She said that “a process will start while a student is here, will end when they graduate, and then affect a student who was not here when the process started.”
When it comes to presenting issues to the administration, Claybaugh sees a discrepancy between what the UC feels strongly about and what the student body feels strongly about. She said that she was interested in hearing about more of these issues, and that she sent a survey at the start of the term, which “brought back a whole set of issues that are not being represented by the UC.” This mismatch is inherent to the design of the UC, which tends to attract students who gravitate towards government or activist work. Claybaugh mentioned that there are very few STEM concentrators on the UC, and that she would like to hear more about the changes these students want to institute.
Claybaugh also said that it can be hard to work on projects that the UC presents because administrators and UC representatives work during different seasons. “The UC is on a different schedule than we are. We do our planning and strategizing work during the breaks, but students are gone. What will happen is that new students [from the UC] will come in and say, ‘We have priorities.’ But the priorities that we’ve set came from earlier generations of UC reps.” This is especially true when it comes to projects that require funding from the administration. Administrators typically fill out their budgets during November when the UC changes leadership; when new representatives come back after winter break with fresh ideas, they find that the budget is already set.
There are institutional barriers and patterns that both the UC and the administration experience when it comes to improving the College. Because of this, students often feel like they are being ignored by the administration. The real dynamic, though, is more complex: The administration is working behind-the-scenes to improve student life at the college, but its greatest challenge is keeping students in the loop.
Conditions for Change
So what can be done to streamline the process? How can students and faculty improve systems of communication so that student agency becomes part of the institutional process? In an interview with the HPR, Manja Klemenčič, a lecturer and researcher of student politics in higher institutions at Harvard, outlined a few solutions.
Klemenčič described a simple way for the administration to gauge the feelings and opinions of the student body — what she called “direct voice.” She said this would be similar to what administrators did for shopping week, which was posting a survey in Canvas — Harvard’s management system for course websites — for all undergraduate students to participate in.
While the idea itself is simple, Klemenčič outlined certain conditions that are required for this method. “One [condition] is a simple question on a deliberated or expected policy change. [Another is] a brief explanation of the issue at stake, not assuming the students will actually know what this issue is all about. And [then] ensuring that in due course, that students are informed of what happened to that particular decision, and how their input has been taken into consideration or not.”
Klemenčič also noted that students should be a part of the process as well, and she said that “this is something that should be agreed together with the UC.” By involving the UC in every step of the process, administrators would work directly with students to develop the questions. However, she noted that this solution should be used as a complement to other methods, and should be used primarily to find out the opinion of the student body.
Klemenčič noted that students do not have expertise on some topics, but not necessarily by their own fault. She said that “we [at Harvard] are lacking more transparency,” and noted that students are unable to fully form opinions without all of the available information. When students are left out of the conversation entirely, it does not make sense to blame them for being uninformed.
Finally, Klemenčič said that the UC could serve as an “intermediary” between students and the administration. UC members have a better understanding of how Harvard is organized than regular students and can find the correct path to voice an issue. Using the UC to bring student issues to the administration cuts down on the time wasted by trying to find the right person to hear a specific issue. In this way, Klemenčič said, the UC has a “special role” in administrative relationships.
While all of these solutions can serve to ease the issues experienced by both students and administrators, if Harvard is really going to experience change, it needs an engaged student body. Without students who speak out and exert pressure, no one will want to fix the poor institutional memory within the UC or make the administration easier to navigate. To increase transparency at Harvard, the student body needs to be engaged and ready to share its opinions. At the very least, students need to legitimize the UC so that its representatives have the leverage they need to enact meaningful change at Harvard. Instead of attaching blame to one group or another, students can do more to achieve change by working together to reform Harvard’s ineffective systems for listening to student perspectives.