What started as a month-long campaign by the Environmental Action Committee (EAC) and Harvard Students for Wind Energy to pass a College-wide referendum on instituting a term-bill fee to support a wind energy initiative has become a University effort to which the administration will contribute handsomely.

University President Lawrence H. Summers announced in March that the University would dedicate $100,000 annually for at least three years to wind energy, an amount that will be split between purchase and research.

A WINDY PATH

The road towards this effort for cleaner and more environmentally-friendly energy has not always been smooth.

Alexander L. Pasternack ’05 and Allison I. Rogers ’04 spearheaded the endeavor in a University-wide renewable energy drive that resulted in a College-wide referendum last December. The proposal was passed by an overwhelming majority of voters—82 percent of voting undergraduates.

The Harvard College administration did not originally view the proposition as favorably.

The student body passed the proposal as a $10 opt-out term-bill fee, but the administration was reluctant, saying that it didn’t want the term-bill to become a “laundry list” of charitable donations, especially after the passage of the opt-out student activities fee increase last spring.

“The term bill is to finance the educational mission of the University, not to finance social action of any kind,” Summers said at the time.

The proposal was eventually rejected by Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71.

GRADUATE SCHOOL SUPPORT

The Kennedy School of Government (KSG) and School of Public Health (SPH) soon announced, however, that they would help foot the bill to pay for the development of wind energy to power the Harvard University campus.

KSG students had previously voted in favor of a mandatory term-bill fee that would pay for all of the KSG’s energy to be derived from renewable sources.

Jaclyn T. Marks (KSG ’06), Assistant for the Energy Technology Innovation Project at KSG and a Harvard College Wind Power Initiative Leader, lauded the administration, saying that there was “no resistance” and that it was “a simple process to get a vote on term-bill addition.”

She also said that SPH, which buys half of its energy through wind energy certificates, was even more amenable to the idea: the initiative there was started and supported by the administration and did not even require a student vote.

NEST EGG