Get Your Act Together

It took 11 men and mostly male audience of the Undergraduate Council (UC) debate for people to finally take issue. A woman has not run for the top position in the UC since 2001, but finally, this year, it has become a campaign issue. It is now time to move from talk to action and from outrage to a solution. Here is a plan for the next UC president.

The most frustrating thing about this issue is how far removed from reality the UC frontrunners were during last week’s UC debates. The approach to increasing diversity has been pretty much the same. Offer money for information sessions; educate people about how to run a campaign; get more freshmen to run. These methods have been tried before, and will do absolutely nothing to remedy a problem that has already become a part of the institutional culture of the UC.

The proposal that is most dim-witted is the attempt to remedy the lack of representation of women and minorities by encouraging more freshmen to run. Freshman elections in the UC are by far the most competitive and it is always too early to remedy representative imbalances at this stage of the process—often just a month or two into freshman year.Furthermore, freshmen are the most likely to drop out the next year because they are vulnerable to alienation from the UC culture. To propose this as a solution for increasing the number of women is to have not thought about the issue enough.

If we want more women on the UC, House elections are our greatest opportunity. In House contests, elections are less competitive and with relatively little support, the needed individuals can be elected. These individuals aren’t going to be reached by information sessions, it is going to take picking and choosing, approaching individual people and organizations, to get them to run. Here women’s and cultural organizations can be approached to ask for specific sophomores or juniors who might be interested in running.

Once that happens, the next step is to ensure that there isn’t a glass ceiling. Years like this year, when 11 men run, are unacceptable. They are indicative of a UC culture that encourages people similar to the current leadership to run. A good UC leader will do everything in his power to make sure that qualified women and minority representatives run before he chooses to announce his own candidacy. If a woman does not run for president next year, as I suspect will happen, all of this talk will have been just that, talk, to help ambitious men appeal to the liberal constituencies of the College in propelling their ascent to power.

I believe all of those steps can be achieved within a year very easily, and if they are achieved. A UC that seeks to be as representative of the student body as possible should be written into the bylaws of the organization, to make sure a situation like this year’s does not arise again.

Once all of these things are put into place it should be the Undergraduate Council’s duty to foster the same type of diversity on the other established student run institutions, like the Institute of Politics, Harvard Student Agencies, and our very own Harvard Crimson, where the issues that were made so apparent to the student body this election cycle exist in similar if not worse conditions. If we accept barriers of race, gender, and class among Harvard students, where they are so easy to eradicate, then we cannot take them on in the real world. Harvard is the microcosm; Harvard is where we must start.



Kyle A. de Beausset ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is an environmental science and public policy concentrator in Leverett House. He was a candidate for Vice President in the 2006 UC election.