This afternoon eager first-years will flock to the first open house of the year for Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP).

They’ll come to the IOP for the chance to meet political celebrities—who last year included both Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as Kofi Annan.

They’ll come hoping to make a name for themselves in a place known as a hotbed for self-avowed political junkies.

“The IOP is really good at showing the glamorous side of politics,” says Sonia H. Kastner ’03, an officer of the IOP and president of the Harvard College Democrats. “Politics can be very sophisticated...It’s not all just knocking on doors.”

But as first-years join as organization that has welcomed presidents and kings and was created to honor American political prince John F. Kennedy ’40, they may not find as much exclusivity as classes of aspiring politicians before them.

After an overhaul of the IOP student leadership imposed two years ago ushered in a year of turmoil followed by a year of adjustment, some see the IOP’s leadership quietly moving away from the high-powered image often associated with its core membership.

In November 2000, then-director David H. Pryor left vocally angry students in his wake when he disbanded the IOP’s self-selecting Student Advisory Committee (SAC) and instituted open elections for the student governing board.

But now, after a year of getting used to the new structure, the changes Pryor instituted by fiat are almost universally praised as creating a more friendly institute—and students are trying to continue this trend and correct problems within the IOP that Pryor could not.

Large and In Charge

The multi-faceted IOP offers a number of programs, including large forums with famous speakers, small study groups where students discuss current events with IOP fellows—politicians, pundits and others who have chosen to spend a semester at Harvard—and a program where students teach civics in public high schools.

But the services the IOP provides to Harvard students with a casual interest in politics were never a source of intense controversy.

Rather, it is the institutionalized hierarchy of students who have official positions at the IOP that maintains a lingering reputation for insularity.

This year, students want to dispel the perception that the IOP inner circle is a clique of over-ambitious would-be senators, both by reaching out to other student groups and by focusing more programs on substantive political debate.

When Pryor, a former Democratic senator from Arkansas, disbanded SAC in November 2000, he called for “a new day at the Institute of Politics,” saying that the SAC’s tradition of appointing its own successors was “not what democracy is.”

Others at the time spoke of power struggles within SAC and between students and the IOP’s professional staff, a division only exacerbated when the restructuring came without initial student input.