Harvard’s student body is governed by the Harvard Undergraduate Administration, a group of elected student officials primarily responsible for distributing funds from the Student Activities Fee to student organizations on campus and bringing student concerns to administrators.

This school year, co-presidents Zachary “Zach” Berg ’28 and Daniel Zhao ’28 will lead the HUA after beating seven other tickets in a turbulent spring election, which saw three tickets suspended for violating election guidelines and one candidate jump off the John W. Weeks Footbridge as part of his campaign.

The pair inherited a body plagued by what many students have described as a lack of authority and campus engagement — problems Berg and Zhao pledged to fix.

They campaigned as an “insider-outsider” ticket: Berg had no prior HUA experience but pitched sweeping changes, while Zhao had served as HUA co-treasurer during a tenure marked by delayed club funding, a problem that has repeatedly dogged the student government.

The two pledged to “recenter students” by raising $2.1 million in alumni donations to support club sports, STEM, the arts, and affinity groups. They also planned to consolidate the HUA’s disparate student events into several larger celebrations and install a student observer on the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body.

The fundraising effort began, they said, even before the election.

“We called a numerous amount of potential donors. We actually visited those people who have experience fundraising for Harvard in the past,” Zhao said during the campaign.

Now, roughly a third of the way into their tenure, some of those goals have shifted.

What’s New

Berg and Zhao plan to hold their first fundraising event September 17 and publicly release their “first string of donation numbers” afterward.

“We’re very excited to have gotten our first donation to the HUA for this year. We’re looking to continue to pursue alumni donations,” Berg said. “But ultimately it is the end and not the means that is the most important to us.”

The pair now describe alumni fundraising as one of several ways to get more resources to students rather than the centerpiece of their fundraising strategy.

Some of the needs Berg and Zhao hoped to address through outside fundraising are already being met independently by the College, Berg said, making alumni donations supplementary rather than necessary.

“Does this mean that we are not going to fundraise? No, we’re going to use fundraising as a way to supplement other ways of getting money. But ultimately, it is not about how we get money to students. It is about getting money to students and getting the money that they need because that is really the need that we’re trying to fill,” he said.

The shift comes as the HUA operates on the largest budget in its history after an increase in the Student Activities Fee nearly doubled the organization’s funding independent of any alumni donations.

Berg pointed to Harvard’s rollout of premium Claude subscriptions for students their academic year as an example of the pair’s broader approach to advocacy. Though Berg and Zhao said they did not significantly influence the rollout, they supported the move and had discussed AI access with College administrators.

“A lot of our work, to be fair on this, has not actually been implemented. A lot of people I talk to still don’t know it exists,” Berg said. Still, Berg added, “it is a win in that it is a resource that is available to students, that people that talked to Daniel and I said they wanted to have.”

The rollout, the pair said, reflects how they hope to work with administrators going forward: identifying areas where students’ priorities overlap with goals the College already shares.

“The administration actually has also been pushing for AI. It’s one of Dean Deming’s goals, and a lot of the job is realizing where interests align,” Berg said.

Deming has offered an arms-length approach to the integration of artificial intelligence in the classroom, saying in April that he hopes to “push harder” and describing AI as an urgent challenge for the College.

That approach also comes with a new priority that did not feature prominently in their campaign: civil discourse.

Berg said that the pair are planning an event focused on civility in the coming weeks after conversations with executive officers and alumni. They also hope to collaborate with Harvard’s graduate student government focused on an interfaith event in the spring.

He said promoting civil discourse — a theme frequently emphasized by Harvard administrators through initiatives on intellectual vitality and viewpoint diversity — will be a priority this semester.

“We didn’t talk that much about civil discourse in our campaign, and yet it’s actually one of the things that is most important to Daniel and me,” Berg said.

The pair has not set concrete dates for events throughout the semester, though Berg said they hope the programming will be “continuous” throughout their term.

Building a Team

Berg and Zhao’s priorities have also been shaped by the HUA’s independently elected executive officers, including treasurers and officers overseeing academic life, well-being, social life, sports, and extracurriculars.

Much of the co-presidents’ work this summer focused on supporting those officers, finalizing an executive cabinet, and recruiting new members to the HUA, Berg said.

Zhao, who previously served as co-treasurer alongside Rachel Fields ’27, has been working “closely” with incoming treasurers Polina Krumkachev ’29 and Jake Marino ’29 to improve the HUA’s financial systems.

During the campaign, Zhao pledged to move away from Harvard Federal Credit Union-administered funds after clubs faced delays of up to several months in receiving HUA grants.

Zhao said Marino and Krumkachev began onboarding onto the HUA’s existing grant system “way earlier than people do so,” learning technical details of the role and helping newly transitioned student organization officers apply for funding ahead of the semester.

“Jake and Polina, I know, have spent a lot of time going through their email and basically emailing back and forth with a bunch of officers to help them prepare for the incoming semester,” Zhao said.

Their focus, Zhao said, has been centered on making the current grant system more efficient so that more clubs can apply for money from the HUA.

Sports Officer Ella Ricketts ’29 said she plans to focus on fundraising for club sports, an “underfunded” portion of student activities that Berg and Zhao highlighted during their campaign. She also hopes to boost student engagement with athletic events across campus.

On the advocacy side, Ricketts said she hopes to push for “a little more grace” for athletes who must miss class for competition and standardize communication with professors to reduce stress.

She plans to schedule meetings with athletic administrators and Harvard College Dean David J. Deming in September, she said, to sit in on education committee meetings, and lobby faculty on the issue.

“Obviously classes are really important, and you also can’t not go to a meet or competition,” Ricketts said. “So it’s like making those people happy is gonna be hard, but worth working on.”

Extracurricular Officer Adam Han ’29, a Crimson News editor, wrote in a statement that he is preparing to roll out a club discovery and application system intended to make Harvard’s more than 450 student organizations easier to navigate.

The project began under former HUA Extracurricular Officer Joshua M. Schultzer ’28 who solicited student proposals for the platform through an open-call app competition last year.

Though officers have worked on individual projects ahead of the school year, Berg said he and Zhao have also injected some of their own priorities into officers’ agendas.

Berg said he and Social Life Officer Asante Kilo ’29 have been working closely to plan an HUA-hosted event during the first three weeks of the semester that “people will actually remember.”

Berg also said he brought Well-Being Officer Tess E. Sumner ’29, a Crimson News editor, into Campus Saves Lives, a mental health advocacy organization focused on intercollegiate advocacy. Berg said he joined the organization as a Harvard representative shortly after being elected co-president.

Recruitment has been another focus this summer, extending the pair’s campaign promise to increase early buy-in for the HUA and strengthen institutional memory within the student government.

Berg described interest during an HUA orientation for incoming freshmen as “unparalleled.” A call scheduled for one hour stretched to two as Berg stayed to answer questions from interested first-years, he said.

Participation remains a priority for the pair. Limited student engagement and HUA’s weak institutional authority have been recurring talking points in elections since the organization replaced the Undergraduate Council four years ago — and were persistent challenges for the pair’s predecessors.

“We really want general meetings to have dozens and dozens of people every single time,” Berg said.

Still to Be Addressed

Perhaps the most ambitious promise the pair campaigned on — adding a student observer to the Corporation — remains undefined.

During the campaign, the pair pitched the role as a way to address the HUA’s weak institutional standing and said they would frame the proposal to administrators as a transparency measure rather than a transfer of power.

In an April interview, they said they would “take every avenue available” to build leverage for students and strengthen the position of future HUA co-presidents.

Now, Berg calls the position an “ongoing discussion.”

“What does that even mean, right?” Berg said. “Daniel and I try to approach every conversation with administrators, with people in positions of power who might be able to have this happen, with humility.”

But despite the private nature of the talks, the pair said they will “try to push” for transparency, a core tenet of their campaign.

Berg and Zhao also alluded to other ongoing collaborations with College administrators but declined to share specifics.

“Zach and I can’t talk too much in the specifics right now, but there’s a bunch of collaborations that we’re doing with the administration right now to basically work on finding ways we can mutually support,” Zhao said. “We’re really excited to work with them because they have some fascinating ideas surrounding this topic, and our goal is to basically get students as much support as possible.”

“We’ve had some excellent conversations with administrators about why the HUA is valuable and why students feel that they aren’t being funded,” Berg added.

—Staff writer Alma T. Barak can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at almabk.54. Follow her on X @almabk_.

—Staff writer Theresa F. Bartelme can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at theresabartelme.15. Follow her on X @theresabartelme.