The 22-member Coop Board of directors is composed of 11 undergraduate and graduate students from Harvard and MIT and 11 non-students.

Its members admit the Coop must do something about its image.

"It's tough mailing things to the students," Murphy says. "There's no question we can communicate better with the students.

"We don't do as many surveys as we should," he adds. "There's not a lot of feedback. We need some direction."

The Coop places newspaper ads, hangs banners from the roof and door-drops flyers through Harvard Student Agencies, but it does not always have campus mailing addresses because many students send their bills home, Murphy says.

A graduate student who is a member of the board says the Coop should attract students with special deals and value prices.

"I'd like to see some kind of structure that's attractive--students saying, `I shop at the Coo because I get this," says Alberto Moel, a member of the 1995-96 Coop board of directors who is in his second year at the Business School.

An undergraduate member of the 1995-96 board says one of his goals is to increase communication with the students.

"I'm going to fight for a change in theelection process so that it's much more exposedprocess so students," says Eugene Koh-'97 '96, whois a Crimson editor "[At the beginning of thesemester], anyone who needs to buy a textbookwould see information about elections."

Chair of the Board of Directors William R.Dickson says he realizes students and othermembers may not always feel their membership isvaluable.

"I think we need to convert the business tomake sure our members want to first belong andsecondly to purchase goods and services," saysDickson, who is senior vice president at MIT.

The Pricing Myth

Contrary to popular student belief that theCoop is wildly overpriced, Murphy says Coop pricesare competitive.

"We may be a dollar over on one and a dollarunder on the other," Murphy says, "For the mostpart, I feel we're fairly competitive."

A Crimson price comparison last week showedthat Murphy's statement is fairly accurate. TheCoop is more expensive than surrounding HarvardSquare stores on some items and less expensive onothers (see graphic).

But students malign the Coop most for itstextbook prices. Because it has a virtual monopolyin Harvard Square, they say, it jacks up textbooksprices to pay for other, less profitabledepartments.

"Usually the [student] felling is--we'reselling women's [clothes and shoes] at a loss, andtextbook sales are subsidizing it," Murphy say.But he says that notion is not accurate