“I would really like to see the Undergraduate Council become involved in the most pressing, most controversial issues facing students,” she says.

Lee says the council has recently “shifted away from its other main goal, which is to serve as the student voice.”

Lee says she regrets not knowing how to speak for the student body when she was contacted by an ABC News reporter who asked her to comment on the recent controversy surrounding Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers and Fletcher University Professor Cornel West ’74.

She calls the council “a legitimate body for voicing student opinion to the administration and others.”

Some council members have long viewed the body as the public voice of Harvard students, drafting bills such as one last year that encouraged environmentally friendly investing. But more conservative council members have long believed that bills with political themes fell beyond the council’s scope.

Barkley says that addressing controversial issues can be dangerous for the council.

“It tends to divide the council in a negative way,” he says. “It tends to strain people’s friendships.” Barkley says he remembers a time when issues such as whether dining hall should serve grapes farmed by migrant workers dominated the council’s docket.

“When you delve into these political issues, people are going to start yelling at each other again,” he says.

But Lee says she would like to use some council meeting time to discuss the presence of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) on campus.

Lee says she would also like to address environmental waste at Harvard.

“It’s kind of a political thing, but it affects students’ lives,” Fernandez says. But council member Brian R. Smith ‘02 says Lee and Fernandez should focus on continuing Gusmorino’s student services success rather than working to expand the council’s scope.

“The biggest challenge is to keep the council at the level of performance that it was under Paul,” Smith says. “Sujean and Annie have the ability to keep it at that level.”

Transfer of Power

Though Lee faces high expectations and questions about her vision for the scope of council policy, most council members say she should experience little difficulty taking over the top job.

“Sujean is going in already having a large learning curve,” Gusmorino says, referring to Lee’s tenure as council vice-president and, before that, Campus Life Committee (CLC) chair.

SAC Chair Rohit Chopra ’04 says Lee’s extensive council experience may be her most valuable asset.

More importantly, Chopra says, Gusmorino has left such a positive legacy in the area of student services that Lee has the luxury to ponder more broadly the council’s place in the University.

“Paul’s mission was to clean up and regain the trust of students and the administration,” Chopra says. “Sujean’s charge is really to move more to the bigger picture. What Sujean has to do is go for far-reaching effectual change.”

—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.