Change is in the air in Harvard Hall 104.
The Undergraduate Council approved a major financial reform in each of its two meetings so far this year. Both are reversals of recent council policy.
On election night, October 16, the council repealed last spring's controversial $10 term bill fee hike.
And Sunday it restored students' option to check a box on their term bills and withhold $16.67 of their $20 yearly council contributions.
The changes passed with relative case--especially surprising after last spring's council pushed so hard against the check box option and for the fee hike.
Why the backtracking on its own measures?
Many council members say the controversial efforts of former council representative Anjalee C. Davis '96 last spring kept these issues at the forefront of campus debate.
Davis organized a petition drive that brought five structural and financial issues before the student body in a campus-wide referendum--but only after much wrangling.
Davis is taking this semester off from Harvard and taking courses at the University of California at Berkeley. She has not returned repeated phone calls.
Elimination of the fee hike and restoration of the check-off option were two of her major reform platforms.
Council President David L. Hanselman '94-'95, who was away from Harvard last year, credits Davis with alerting the council to student opinion.
"Anjalee got students excited about the issue, and I guess in a sense woke the U.C. up, and got us to say we have to be accountable to students," Hanselman says.
But David V. Bonfili '96, who helped start a movement pushing for Davis-esque changes, says Davis actually hindered reform while she was here.
"I think the biggest thing is not so "There was a lot of [animosity] on the council towards Anjalee," adds Bonfili, who is co-founder of the Movement to Reform the Undergraduate Council (MRUC). Still, Bonfili says Davis was successful in keeping her issues before the council. "You could say that she was necessary, but not sufficient for reform," Bonfili says. Other council members say the changes would have happened with or without Davis. Council Vice President Brandon C. Gregoire '95 says Davis "didn't have that much to do with shooting the [fee hike] down." He says the council had to demonstrate clear student support for the fee hike before it could bring the issue before the Faculty Council. And he says there was "a lot of negative sentiment" that precluded the Undergraduate Council from going forward. Rudd W. Coffey '97, co-chair of the campus life committee and co-founder of MRUC, says the council decided to repeal the two measures simply because they were constantly distracting members from the student government's real business: serving undergraduates. He says many of the members voted to repeal the measures because they "didn't want to be part of an organization they couldn't be proud of." But first-year law school student Carey W. Gabay '94, who was council president last year, characterizes the new council as more "pragmatic" and "political." Gabay says that compared to the one he led, this council is more sensitive to student opinion as reflected in campus press. "It's always good to have a newspaper around to check a student government, or any government," Gabay says. "But I don't think it's a good think if 90 percent of the council's decisions are based on what The Crimson says." "The job of a student representative isn't to mirror the [will] of the students," Gabay adds. "It's to take that in part and in part to make your own decisions [on the issues]."
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