The Red Line
Wherefore the UC?
Should Harvard’s UC represent student concerns about University governance to the Harvard administration? Recently, students have explored the UC as a tool for institutional change. For example, this semester, the UC had “an unprecedented 150 applicants for around 60 spots” on student-faculty committees, two-thirds more than last year. This UC election will also feature an unprecedented three student-initiated referenda of the ballot, suggesting that student activists view the UC as an important vehicle for organizing and expressing student opinion issues ranging from endowment ethics to sexual assault policies on campus.
Welcome to East Point?
Ignoring the fact that the women’s soccer team has probably been doing “high knees” for years, the Gazette fondly describes the exercises done by ROTC students, including push-ups, sit-ups, and high knees, which it describes as a “heart-pumping exercise that resembles skipping.”
A Profitable Library?
What exactly “transitioned” in Harvard’s libraries in the past eight months? Most apparently, the library now has a new centralized website, which allows students to more easily find the hours and locations of libraries. But if we want to see the real changes that have occurred in Harvard Library, we need to look beyond its shiny new website and examine the values underlying the reorganization. Indeed, Harvard has rearranged the library workforce—in order to make the Harvard Library more “efficient.”
Aid Isn’t Enough
Yet Harvard’s student body is still much, much richer than the average group of American residents. As Justin Lanning ’12 noted in The Crimson last year, calculations based on information from the Harvard Financial Aid Office “come to the stunning conclusion that approximately 45.6 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from families with incomes above $200,000, placing them in the top 3.8 percent of American households. Even more shockingly, only about 4 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from the bottom quintile of U.S. incomes and a mere 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles of U.S. incomes.” Despite the Financial Aid Initiative launched in 2004 and the efforts of Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program, Harvard still has relatively few working- and middle-class students.
