“It appears that you and Mike decided that you would run this project instead of operating it through [the Campus Life Committee], the committee under whose purview it falls,” Barro wrote to Mahan over the list. “You criticized Rohit for ‘micromanaging’ the Council during the campaign, so why are you micromanaging this project?”

One decision made about a Sunday afternoon keg return was hardly the only time Mahan took criticism for allowing a select group of advisers to publicly lead the council. Mahan’s signature issue this semester, the proposed increase in the Student Activities Fee to $75 from its previous $35, brought out vocal dissent within the council and from the student body at large. And Mahan’s executive decision-making hardly garnered him widespread support.

THE MALLEABLE CABINET

The bitter campaign over the campus-wide referendum to increase the termbill fee exemplified the problems that arose when council decision-making was concentrated in the hands of Mahan and his allies—who apparently did not even recognize the disproportionate level of influence they were exerting.

“Matt made very few unilateral decisions,” says Russell M. Anello ’04, one of the sponsors of the council bill that brought about the undergraduate referendum. “I was involved in most of them, Matt Glazer was involved. A lot of them had four or five people.”

Four or five people may have been enough consultation for Mahan, but the process of decision by informal committee failed when the rest of the council became involved.

Mahan’s lack of consultation with the council at large became most obvious when Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 told him that despite the student body’s 53 percent support for a $40 increase in the Student Activities Fee, “it was unlikely that the [Faculty] Council would approve an increase to $75 immediately,” as Gross puts it in an e-mail. Mahan decided to win over the 18-professor body by asking for an increase in two stages—to $60 for the 2004-2005 academic year and to the full $75 the next year.

“That came out of a lot of conversations with a number of people—with about six or seven different UC people who were involved in getting it passed, with students who had e-mailed me and with the administrators and notably Dean Gross—I really just thought that spreading it over two years was the most prudent approach for students,” Mahan says. “That really was a kind of executive decision—a decision that was part of the...carrying out of the will of the student body, which is what I do on a daily basis.”

Though the referendum students approved ended on May 1, and the Faculty Council did not meet to discuss the fee increase until its Wednesday afternoon meeting on May 12, Mahan only announced his executive decision over House e-mail lists—and even then only on the night of May 11—and, despite having presided over a council meeting on May 9, never officially informed the council. Angered at having been left in the dark, council members complained over UC-general. By the time of the Faculty Council meeting, the list had seen 18 heated messages, including three defenses from Mahan, exchanged on the topic.

The three council members from Lowell House, Chadbourne, Polly W. Klyce ’06 and council Finance Committee Chair Teo P. Nicolais ’06, expressed their indignation in messages over UC-general and the Lowell House open e-mail list, but did not stop there. After calling the office of Secretary of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) John B. Fox Jr. ’59 early Wednesday and asking—but not receiving—permission to observe Mahan’s presentation to the Faculty Council, Chadbourne, Klyce and Nicolais showed up at the Faculty Room, on the second floor of University Hall that afternoon.

“From the very beginning...I wanted a smaller increase,” says Nicolais. “I think 60 was absolutely the right number.”

While one delegation member says the three showed up in order to intimidate Mahan, Nicolais says they only wanted to observe his presentation on behalf of the students, who they felt were in the dark.

“We wanted to be sure that what was being told to the student body was the same thing that was being told to the Faculty Council,” Nicolais says. “Faced with a $60 [fee] or no increase, $60 was absolutely the right way to go. But it wasn’t the right way to go about it. This was not a problem he had just learned of.”

Mahan says he first learned of the delegation’s plans to attend the meeting in an e-mail from Fox, who did not know which council members planned to attend, but expressed hope “that only yourself will appear for this afternoon’s meeting.”

“Literally, right as we’re supposed to go in [to the meeting] the three members of the Lowell House delegation walked up,” Mahan says. “I think it was just a little discourteous....You have to have some kind of coordination if you’re going to be professional as a body.”