"We get caught up in meaningless nitpicking about by-laws issues or other operational nuances, at the loss of events, activities and real service to the students," Malka said.

Popular Elections

One of the major concerns of the Freshman Caucus is to make sure that the council is to make sure that the council is more in touch with the concerns of students. Most members seem to agree that the recently-approved popular elections for council officers will help make the council more representative.

Michael E. Driscoll '98 said that direct elections of these officers is necessary for the council to better provide services and to act as a voice for the student body.

"I think the U.C. has been partially successful on both of these fronts, but to make greater strides in both, I think U.C. elections must be competitive. This requires that students care enough about the U.C. to run and to vote," Driscoll said.

Wesley B. Gilchrist '98 said that direct elections of the council's president and vice-president are a must for making students more interested in the council.

"The U.C. must become more recognizable on campus," Gilchrist said. "For all the supposed political power that this great university has produced, the students here seem remarkably apathetic towards their own government."

Some members worry, however that while direct elections may seem like a good idea in the abstract, in practice they could do more harm than good.

Zamari M. Triana '98 said that while she approves of direct elections as a concept, she does not believe that they could be successfully implemented because of the difficulty of working our such details as campaign funding.

"I'm all for the Aristotelean school of political science, but on such a unique campus as ours, certain principles come into conflict (i.e., how can I disseminate my message to 6,000 plus students and have a $250 spending cap?)" Triana wrote in an e-mail message.

Reichel said he advocates a more grass-roots approach to increasing awareness and students' involvement in the council.

"It's always popular to say that more democracy is necessarily better, but I don't think that's so in the U.C's case," Reichel said. "Nobody votes in our elections anyway, and to give a so-called popular mandate to the person who wins a limited popularity contest kind of puts us all at the mercy of his or her whim."

"I think the key to being more responsible to the students is to get more candidates and better turnout on a house-to-house basis. Creating a circus sideshow with a campus-wide election is only going to make the U.C. more vulnerable to criticism," Reichel added.

Finance Committee

First-year members played an important role on the council's finance committee, helping to reform the process by which the council gives grants to student organizations. They see this reform as one of the most important ways for the council to broaden its base of influence on campus.