HUA Issues Constitutional Recommendations on Referenda to Problem Solving Team

The Harvard Undergraduate Association Executive Team proposed recommendations for constitutional reform to the HUA’s problem solving team in a Tuesday afternoon email.

The proposals, sent from HUA Co-Presidents Ashley C. Adirika ’26 and Jonathan Haileselassie ’26, define the scope for HUA referenda and call for semesterly College-wide HUA surveys, promising an end to monthslong uncertainty around the fate of student referenda.

“Over the last two weeks, the HUA Executive Team has worked collaboratively to come up with language that we believe speaks to the spirit of our Constitution,” Adirika and Haileselassie wrote to The Crimson Tuesday night. “We are pleased to have produced a recommendation to the Problem-Solving Team to assist them in resolving the constitutional question they were tasked with solving last semester.”

Once the problem solving team approves the recommendations, they wrote, the guidelines will “dictate future HUA referendum processes.”

The HUA Executive Team’s proposals, obtained by The Crimson, state that referenda submitted to the HUA have to focus on the group’s policies.

“Referenda are specifically designed to dictate HUA policy. They are not intended to address broader issues unrelated to the operations or governance of the HUA itself,” the document read.

The document adds that eligible HUA referendum proposals must focus on how the HUA governs, rather than on specific issues or topics students want the HUA to advocate for.

The memorandum does not clarify whether it would retroactively apply to petitions such as the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee’s from last spring.

In April, the HUA formed the problem solving team to resolve a constitutional crisis after the PSC successfully passed a petition to initiate a referendum on whether Harvard should divest from institutions supporting “Israel’s occupation of Palestine.”

After the HUA received another referendum petition parodying the PSC’s, the body indefinitely postponed all student referenda and formed the problem solving team.

But in the months since its creation, the problem solving team has produced little.

Instead of asking the problem solving group to produce a solution, Assistant Dean of Student Engagement and Leadership Andy Donahue — the College’s official adviser to the HUA — encouraged HUA leadership to send its own recommendations to the problem solving team for review earlier this semester.

If approved by the problem solving team, the new recommendations will solidify the scope and processes for HUA student referenda. Under the proposed guidelines, the PSC referendum — which did not concern HUA policy — would likely not be approved by the HUA.

To “better capture student sentiment” on broader issues, the HUA’s Executive Team proposed a semesterly college-wide survey administered by the HUA to “serve as a platform for student organizations to solicit opinions on various issues of interest.”

Per the proposal, student groups can submit questions to be included in the survey, and “each question must be accompanied by the name of the submitting organization, which will be listed as the sponsor of that question.”

Though the HUA has polled student opinions in the past — asking questions such as whether Harvard “should include student positions on its Board of Overseers,” the University’s second-highest governing board — the newly proposed survey process requires questions to be attributed to student organizations, making it impossible to anonymously submit referenda proposals, as was the case with the PSC parody petition.

Lorenzo Z. Ruiz ’27, a member of the problem solving team and a Crimson Editorial editor, said the HUA’s proposals are “palatable” and that he expects the team to accept them.

“The sense that I get — although I’ve seen no movement whatsoever from anybody else on the problem solving team — is that they likewise won’t find it objectionable and will reach the same conclusion that we should go ahead and assent to it in whatever extremely limited way we have the power to assent to things,” Ruiz said.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.

—Staff writer Adithya V. Madduri can be reached at adithya.madduri@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @adithyavmadduri.