Home | Read Issues | Join | Advertise | Donate | Staff List | Search | Contact Us

December 2000

Staff Editorial
There is hope in an era of Bush.
by the PERSPECTIVE staff

UC Endorsement
Steve Smith and James Coleman are the liberal's choice.
by the PERSPECTIVE staff

Canadian Comrades
It really is better up there.
by Danny Schlozman

Triumph or Tragedy?
Clinton's legacy is one of calculated compromise.
by Jeffrey Theodore

Buying Survival
Africa needs money, now.
by Ved Lekic and Alexandra Neuhaus-Follini

Pharmitas
Pharmaceutical companies fund Harvard research.
by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

Students for What?
Folic acid has a hidden message.
by Shelby Meyerhoff

Greens Take Root
PERSPECTIVE talks to Cliff Ginn.
by Dev Purkayastha

A Year to Remember
A year from Seattle, the WTO protests go on.
by Bob Elliott

Cry Freedom
America's ideal of freedom is questionable.
by Nikhil Jaikumar

Introspective
In Defense of Money
by Brad Hershbein

Salmagundi

The Back Page
Keeping Christmas
by Julia Silvis

By the PERSPECTIVE staff

In this year's Undergraduate Council presidential election, we enthusiastically endorse Steve Smith and James Coleman.

We carefully considered the other two candidate teams which provided us with campaign statements, Paul Gusmorino-Sujean Lee and Matt Zanotelli-John Bash.

We emphatically encourage students not to vote for the Barkley-Johnson team: Barkley is widely known as an ultra-conservative Council member; in his tenure, he used parliamentary tricks to block work on issues of sexual assault and labor practices.

While we welcome the enthusiasm and creative ideas of the Zanotelli-Bash campaign, we fear that the candidates have too little formal UC experience. As the job of the UC President frequently involves working with other UC members and negotiating with college administrators, we fear that this lack of experience could severely hamper a Zanotelli-Bash administration.

The Smith-Coleman and Gusmorino-Lee campaigns do not have such liabilities. Gusmorino is perhaps best known for the UC Books project, whose public roll-out last February was preceded by months of discussions with various deans and a great deal of programming effort on Gusmorino's part. Smith has chaired the UC's Campus Life Committee for a year and a half, and has aggressively lobbied college administrators on behalf of the Living Wage Campaign and the Coalition Against Sexual Violence. Both candidates have spent a great deal of time on powerful student-faculty committees.

Well-qualified as both candidate teams are, we find significant differences that favor Smith and Coleman. Most prominently, the Smith-Coleman platform calls for continued pressure on administrators to improve working conditions for Harvard employees; a similar demand is absent from the Gusmorino-Lee platform. We have long supported this goal and we here reiterate our commitment to it.

We believe that the difference reflected here is larger than a single issue. Smith, whose tenure on the Living Wage Campaign may be equally significant to his tenure on the UC, has respectfully stood up to administrators in the past. Gusmorino, a veteran of the UC Books project, has largely presented administrators with proposals they have few reasons to reject. As we frequently take positions that place us at odds with the college administration, we emphatically prefer a President willing to defend controversial positions, notwithstanding the Dean's disapproval.

Finally, we vigorously deny the suggestion that because the current presidential administration has accomplished little, candidates Smith and Coleman, who are closely tied to it, would also accomplish little. To make such a claim is to disregard a list of accomplishments that includes a newly formed Concert Commission, and the publication of the Harvard Guide to Campus-Wide Events (which Smith authored). The administration has posted these successes notwithstanding several handicaps, including an absurd impeachment fiasco and a drastic reduction in the size of the council over the past year. “Do-nothing” is perhaps the least appropriate label for the Smith-Coleman team. After all, these candidates brought us two Springfests-including one which former president Noah Seton declared the most successful in UC history-the Har'd Corps Day of Service last year, the Harvard-Yale Battle of the Bands, and a number of other projects which require tremendous effort.

In past years, the presidential election offered students a choice between a generally conservative “student-services” candidate and a generally liberal “political” candidate. Steve Smith and James Coleman have their feet planted firmly in both camps. Their election would be a boon both for student life and for the Living Wage Campaign, and we eagerly endorse them.

Questions? Comments? Please contact perspy@hcs.harvard.edu