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Updated Saturday, April 28, at 12:17 p.m.
Former Harvard Undergraduate Association Co-Presidents John S. Cooke ’25 and Shikoh M. Hirabayashi ’24 ended their 14-month term last week as Harvard College’s student government rapidly descended into controversy.
But before their co-presidency went up in flames, many undergraduate students and some former HUA members said Cooke and Hirabayashi had managed to steer clear of the spotlight largely because the duo accomplished quite little — something they attributed to structural issues with the body overall.
Under Cooke and Hirabayashi’s leadership, the HUA launched a new summer storage partnership with Harvard Student Agencies, hosted an Ivy League-plus student government conference for student leaders, and gauged student opinion before the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted against moving up the deadline to add courses to the third Monday of the semester.
Still, those wins paled in comparison to their lengthy list of campaign promises, which included providing discounted T passes to students, bringing Nap Pods to campus study zones, advocating to Harvard to allow double secondaries, and negotiating with Harvard to de-pest dining halls and study spaces.
Eunice S. Chon ’25-’26, a former member of the HUA’s Academic Team, said Cooke and Hirabayashi had been able to avoid controversies during their term due to inaction.
“The reason why they were able to avoid controversy is also because they didn’t do anything,” Chon said.
Other undergraduate students, including Oscar Lin ’24, said they were familiar with the recent controversies surrounding the HUA — beginning with Cooke’s expulsion from the Fox Club over misconduct allegations and ending with his removal from his post in a landslide recall election — but could not detail any specific initiatives passed under Cooke and Hirabayashi’s term.
“I don’t know what they’ve done this semester or last semester,” Lin said. “I barely noticed the general election.”
The HUA, like its predecessor, the Undergraduate Council, has been plagued with low voter turnout, which dropped 26 percent from last year’s election to this year’s. Meanwhile, 305 more students voted in Cooke’s recall than in the general election to elect the HUA’s current co-presidents, Jonathan Haileselassie ’26 and Ashley C. Adirika ’26.
Peter E. Chon ’26, the former HUA Academic Team Officer under Cooke and Hirabayashi and Eunice Chon’s brother, said the HUA has failed to convince students — especially those who voted to abolish the UC in 2022 — that it can be a more effective alternative to the UC.
“We’re the HUA, but to be honest, if you ask a person — any Harvard student in the Science Center — do you respect the HUA, I would assume that they would say ‘no,’” he said.
“I would say the same if I wasn’t academic officer,” he added.
Cooke did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Hirabayashi wrote in a statement following publication of this article that he has “worked on many new projects such as starting a polling team to directly solicit student opinion and instituting the inaugural survey on Generative AI.”
“I fulfilled core campaign promises by creating a party closet for students to rent out party equipment and establishing a fund that sponsored multiple inter-affinity group collaboration events,” Hirabayashi wrote. “I strongly advocated to the administration on a wide range of issues, including enhanced campus safety, increased academic offerings, and improved mental health resources.”
“I also defended valued programs, such as club funding and summer storage, from administrative rollbacks and worked to expand these programs to serve more students,” he added.
During Cooke’s recall process, the HUA also faced criticism from the Palestine Solidarity Committee after indefinitely postponing all referenda — including a PSC petition that gained enough signatures to trigger a student opinion poll on whether Harvard should divest from “Israel’s occupation of Palestine” — due to a constitutional dispute.
Corbin C. Lubianksi ’24, who served as HUA co-treasurer under Cooke and Hirabayashi, said the HUA’s executive team, led by the co-presidents, suffered from a lack of accountability.
“Who’s really overseeing the executive team here? It’s the executive team,” Lubianksi said.
Lubianski also pointed to structural differences between the HUA and its predecessor, the Undergraduate Council, as causes for the lack of oversight.
“The UC regulated itself pretty well because you had your factions — you had people always watching other people to make sure that they didn’t step out of line. With the HUA, you don’t really have that oversight,” he said.
Haileselassie and Adirika, like their predecessors, also made sweeping campaign pledges, including advocating for multiple secondary concentrations, expanding a rideshare program, and subsidizing laundry and transportation for students.
But Kylie L. Hunts-in-Winter ’25 said she wants the HUA to be more transparent about what it can and cannot accomplish.
“I wish there was an avenue of knowing specific things that we know for sure the HUA actually does have control over and then knowing what these candidates are going to do about those things,” she said.
Many undergraduate students also called for increased transparency and communication from the HUA.
“I feel like the HUA has a lack of communication, and so I don’t really know what’s going on,” Clare X. Morris ’24 said. “With the UC, I felt more aware of what was happening, but now the HUA, it kind of just seems like this big mysterious mess.”
Hirabayashi wrote that he has “maintained clear and constant communication with the officers and regularly informed students of HUA matters through emails, social media, and weekly general meetings.”
Hunts-in-Winter said she was skeptical about whether the HUA can transparently handle the constitutional dispute that led to the postponement of all referenda.
“They said what they were going to do, but in the back of my mind I’m like, ‘but are they actually going to do anything? And are they going to tell us how they did it? And why they did it?’ I don’t expect that,” she said.
Still, Hunts-in-Winter said that abolishing the HUA — a proposal endorsed by one former co-presidential ticket this year — would not be the best path forward for Harvard’s student government.
“I think that calls to abolish the HUA, it’s not really the solution. We just abolished the UC two years ago. The structure isn’t the problem,” Hunts-in-Winter said.
“It’s just the way that it’s interacting with the community — I think that we have to have people in office who are truly prioritizing the well being of the student community,” she added.
Christy J. Jestin ’24, who followed the recent controversies in the HUA and witnessed the abolition of the UC, said he thinks the HUA’s constitution lacks clarity.
“My impression is that this is a constitution that was written through sortition. It’s a couple of random undergrads that threw this together in a couple of weeks,” he said.
Even if the HUA maintains a more hands-off approach to student government compared to the UC, Jestin said he would like the body to provide more clarity on how it functions to students.
“Whatever the arrangement is: clarity about what that looks like, so you don’t have to be a full insider to understand what’s going on,” he said.
—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.
—Staff writer William Y. Tan can be reached at william.tan@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @william_y_tan.
