Leading Tickets Stress Need for College To Make More Space for Students

Undergraduate Council candidates’ Web sites prominently display the myriad ways that they hope to improve social life on campus. But the likelihood of their proposals actually being enacted is another issue altogether.

Of the five tickets running, three feature candidates seem to be in the race for more than just laughs: Benjamin P. Schwartz ’10 and Alneada D. Biggers ’10, Andrea R. Flores ’10 and Kia J. McLeod, and Charles T. James ’09-’10 and Max H. Y. Wong ’10.

All three tickets propose increasing the availability of social space on and off campus.

Both Flores and Schwartz advocate renting out the Cambridge Center for Adult Education on Brattle Street. Flores wants to rent it out every Friday and Saturday from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. and Schwartz wants to rent it out two weekends every month. Both want to use the building to let student groups and others have parties or other social events.

Though Jim Smith, the Center’s executive director, said that alcohol is not allowed at the center, the plan seems otherwise plausible.

“It’s a reasonable thing to propose that [a candidate] would encourage renting space from us,” he said.

UC President Matthew L. Sundquist ’09, said that it would probably cost between $5,000 and $7,000, which he said he thinks is reasonable. The UC has already passed some legislation on the issue.

James is less specific on how he would obtain more student space. His Web site features only a more nebulous statement, saying that “Harvard must grant and create more space” and that space should be “reclaimed for the good of the University and a healthy social atmosphere.”

Schwartz’s is trying to bring back the “party fund”—which was canceled last year by the dean of the College—by proposing a compromise.

He wants to allocate $250 each week to each of the four different House “neighborhoods.” The House Committees would then allocate the funds with approval from their House Masters.

The plan is being modeled after a program in Cabot House, where the HoCo allocates $75 to one party every week, and no funds are allowed to be spent on alcohol.

“I think that could be very beneficial,” Tom R. Benson ’09, Cabot’s HoCo chair, said about the plan.

But Benson added that he thought that the amount of money proposed by Schwartz might be too large, and recommended funding one party in each House every week.

“There’s only so much non-alcoholic purchases at a party,” he said.

For her part, Flores wants to increase the scope of the Student Events Fund to “help student groups defray costs associated with ticketing at the Harvard Box Office,” according to her Web site.

No matter what happens, candidates will likely face a limited budget given that many of Harvard’s schools have been making cuts following the University’s $8 billion in endowment losses.