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After a presidential recall and a contentious election, it hardly seemed like things could get worse for the Harvard Undergraduate Association. Now, our elected representatives have stopped listening to students altogether.

Last week, the HUA approved a petition from the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee seeking a referendum on whether Harvard should divest from institutions supporting “Israel’s occupation of Palestine.”

Then, a group calling itself “Are Harvard Students, Students Against Hate?” circulated their own petition featuring a combination of inane questions (“Should Harvard turn Annenberg into a strip club?”) alongside insidious ones (should Harvard remove Jews from its faculty?).

The HUA’s response? Halting all student referendums indefinitely.

This knee jerk reaction grants a heckler’s veto on what should be a democratic process.

Referenda are a vital avenue for the student body to express their views. In a campus discourse afflicted by persistent doxxing, startling ignorance, and outside meddling, processes like these can cut through narratives and get to the heart of student opinion.

Given the ubiquity of campus conversations about the Israel-Hamas war, providing students with a forum to weigh in on how Harvard’s endowment dollars are doled out is only appropriate.

Instead, thanks to bad-faith meddling, our perspectives remain unheard.

Let’s not kid ourselves. The absurd questions proposed by “Are Harvard Students, Students Against Hate?” are inappropriate for a schoolwide vote. The group surely knows that too.

So rather than acquiescing to this ill-intentioned interference, the HUA should call a spade a spade — or in this case a spoiler a spoiler — and suspend the nonsense referenda while allowing serious ones to proceed.

Instead, in an apparent self-parody of their bureaucratic dysfunction, the HUA is cobbling together a “problem solving team.” This randomly selected group of five undergraduates will be entrusted with the thrilling task of resolving the dispute over referendum procedure.

This administrative extravaganza is unfair and undemocratic. The chicanery of “Are Harvard Students, Students Against Hate?” has left the PSC referendum in limbo. Now, a tiny random subset of our peers will decide how the rest of us can weigh in.

The source of this procedural morass is more than mere mismanagement. At this point, neither the election commission nor the DSO have offered a resolution. To course correct, the HUA must develop a formal, transparent process to discern between petitions that are legitimate and ludicrous.

Our student government likes to claim a democratic mandate. Now is their time to earn it.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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