Apathy Marks UC Town Hall Meeting

One day before voting begins, three Undergraduate Council presidential candidates questioned each other yesterday on how to increase the amount of common space and improve social life at Harvard as part of town-hall style meeting, the second of the two UC debates.

The debate began with four candidates—Michael C. Koenigs ’09 was “assassinated” midway through his opening remarks—and saw frontrunners Andrea R. Flores ’10 and Benjamin P. Schwartz ’10 trade barbs about topics like Schwartz’s final club membership and the extent to which the UC should work with the Harvard administration. The third serious candidate in the race is Charles T. James ’10.

Candidates touched on their plans for making the campus more environmentally sustainable, bringing back the party fund, and addressing the perception that those running for UC president and vice president are doing so to promote themselves rather than the community.

“You don’t take the UC seriously enough!” the assassin shouted as he “shot” Koenigs, who was killed in the midst of delivering a proposal to allow “puppy dogs in dorm rooms.” Koenigs confirmed in a phone interview after the event that the assassination indicated that he had left the race.

A key issue of the debate was Schwartz’ membership in the Fly, a final club.

“If the Cambridge Center doesn’t work,” asked Flores in reference to the current plan to rent out the Brattle Street space on weekend nights for social events, “would you, as a member of a finals club, be willing to open up finals clubs to the community?”

Schwartz said in response that “we need to stop stigmatizing people for their choices and [focus on] opening up spaces for everyone.”

He added that he thinks the plan—which would mean renting out the Cambridge Center for Adult Education—will work, and pointed out that Flores belongs to another selective society, the Seneca.

Flores rebutted the claim by explaining that the Seneca has an open application rather than a punch.

The candidates also debated their approach to advocacy with Flores, the UC’s finance committee chair, and Schwartz, the vice-chair of the Campus Events Board and the UC’s student affairs committee, differing in the extent to which they plan to involve the administration in planning UC action.

“On a broad, philosophical level, it is about working with administrators and taking students’ advice,” Schwartz said. But he added that he also knows “how to turn to students,” something he said he did in centralizing Harvard’s mental-health services into an accessible network for students.

Flores suggested that Schwartz relied too heavily on working with the administration, saying that “it’s not about knowing the most deans.”

But Schwartz said that some action can be taken only with the administration’s support. He noted that he had spoken to administrators about Flores’ proposal to grade students’ first semesters on campus on a pass/no record basis, and that they said the idea is “infeasible.”

“So if the administrators say ‘no,’ will we stop?” Flores said. “No. We need to show them that students care.”

James said he thought that student action should play a larger role in governance.

“We spend our time too much with the administration, not enough with students,” James said.

James said he thought that the debate had turned into a travesty because the feigned assassination and low turnout showed that students were not taking the election seriously.