memorable achievement of the council two years ago was persuading dining halls to serve chocolate milk. Current undergraduates tended to associate the council with series of failed concerts, high-schoolish election campaigns and irrelevant debates.

But beginning with the election of Kenneth E. Lee '89 as council chair, the stage seemed set for an "activist" revolution--or, at least, evolution.

"I am for an active, progressive Undergraduate Council." And with that Lee kicked off his campaign for chair last September, and the council's leap into the real world.

Lee, in remarks targeted at the council's conservative skeptics, insisted that a mature body could handle both the gritty details of student life and the philosophical debate of campus politics. "Service issues, political issues--we can do them both," he promised.

Indeed, events seemed to bear Lee out. More than half the candidates for council ran on platforms opposing Harvard's nine all-male final clubs--an issue which the council had straddled the year before--as the election for chair essentially became a race to the campus' political left. In fact, Lee--now often identified with the council's liberal agenda for his leadership on a variety of outspoken resolutions--at first represented the conservative alternative in the final election for chair.

But with Lee at the helm and his election opponent, Frank E. Lockwood '89, leading the council's Services Committee, the council embraced its new activist image. In a matter of weeks, the council rattled off a series of resolutions which framed its progressive agenda in no uncertain terms.

"I think what I wanted to show first semester was that the council could actually get things done, because the one word attached to us was 'ineffectiveness,'" Lee says. "If we could plan ourselves so that we had something coming every week, and make a definitive statement and take definitive action on something every week, then we were showing we weren't ineffective."

Lee's schedule wound up fulfilling the campaign promises of many new council members, and almost no one's as conspicuously as the liberal Lockwood. Together, the two worked out council positions on the confrontational issues of final clubs, a 17-year-old union drive on campus, minority faculty hiring and many other student issues.

Carefully toeing a middle line, however, the council frequently found ways not to isolate any constituency. Its final club resolution, for example, passed the week after elections, stopped short of calling for the abolition of the clubs, as many anti-final club activists urged. Instead, it explicitly recognized the clubs' right to exist while urging them to eliminate discrimination.

Meanwhile, further stepping out of its traditional role as provider of student services, the council next urged the University to accept the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) and "to end legal attempts to invalidate election results to begin contract negotiations."

The resolution did not mark the council's first stand on HUCTW. Only the spring before, the body endorsed the union's goals. But the precedent did not curtail opposition from representatives last fall who felt strongly that the council should not address issues which did not directly affect students.

This question of whether the council should continue to address "non-student" issues seldom gained explicit mention last year, but it underscored debates on activism throughout the year. But the silence was taken as acceptance, and for the most part, the council embraced its activist image with no apologies.

With such a mandate, the council took its jabs at the Harvard administration, calling for a rejection of a Board of Overseers plan to change its election procedures, saying it was a "transparent attempt to disenfranchise the alumni."

The plan, set forward in the Young Report, broadened the administration's role in selecting University-endorsed candidates to the Overseers at the expense of activist alumni.

But the first-semester project which best captured student sentiment took form in the council's effort to urge Harvard to increase the number of minority and women faculty.