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Harvard Graduate Council President Dalton Fogarty announced the cancellation of two HCG initiatives — the return of alumni email addresses and subsidized MBTA passes for graduate students — at the group’s third meeting of the semester Monday.
According to Fogarty, a Harvard Business School student, restoring alumni email addresses and subsidizing MBTA cannot be addressed by HGC because each graduate school has a different policy.
“In terms of the actual email service itself, that appears to be a school by school decision based on a school by school budget,” Fogarty said. “So that's an unfortunate situation, but I am sort of indebted to give you an update as to where we actually ended up last year.”
Marshall Page, Associate Director of Student Engagement at the Office of the Provost, gave the keynote speech at the meeting, just a few months after he informed the HGC that the Provost’s Office would stop funding its legal aid program.
But neither the members of the graduate council nor Page himself addressed the legal aid program during the course of the meeting, the third of the newly-elected graduate council.
In response to a question about funding, Page said that the Provost Office provides the main budget for HGC, but he is in favor of partnering with the council to plan student events like graduate intramural programs.
“We fund the core budget of the HGC. That’s because there's no student wide against the university wide activity fee — all your student governments are funded by local student activity fees,” Page said.
Page told the council in his speech that their purpose is to unite the Harvard graduate schools so that they can tackle common problems together.
“The best way the HGC can work is if a topic or question or beef comes up at HGC, and then Dalton, or Victor, or one of the officers, can ask me for a referral,” Page said. “I’ve been at Harvard a long time, so I know a lot of people, and I can usually connect you with a couple of people to get that conversation started.”
Page also got the opportunity to talk a bit about himself, stating that he first came to Cambridge because he “followed a girl up here 14 years ago.”
To close out the speech, Fogarty asked Page what has kept him motivated while working at Harvard for 12 years.
“I like Harvard,” Page said. “It’s kind of like working for the mayor of a pretty big town, not even a small town.”
The chairs of the executive board committees also presented their upcoming initiatives during Monday’s meeting. Tejaswi Polimetla, the chair of programming, announced an upcoming “Decades, Deserts, and DJs” Gradfest and Diwali celebration with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
The council continued to discuss the creation of a one-stop platform for social events, a possibility raised during HGC’s second meeting. Fogarty called for representatives to use the HGC’s resources to promote and expand their schools’ events.
“If you come to us, we can find the funds to be able to say, ‘Hey, we can try and get a few other schools in,’ and then we can use this forum to distribute that information,” Fogarty said.
—Staff writer Maeve T. Brennan can be reached at maeve.brennan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @mtbrennan.
—Staff writer Angelina J. Parker can be reached at angelina.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinajparker.
