Word: czars
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Every year the campus’s Fun Czar oversees the planning of the Freshman Formal along with the First Year Social Committee, a group of eager frosh hand-chosen by the fun czar and Freshman Dean’s Office. (Elections for the committee were quietly ended in 2007.) My sophomore year, as vice-chair of the College Events Board, I was lucky enough to chaperone the swanky formal at the Charles Hotel, where freshmen enjoyed an open bar of soft drinks and bottled water. Unfortunately for fun at Harvard, the Fun Czar at the time forgot to request...
...mention this disaster not to embarrass the fun czar but rather to highlight the overarching problem with the czarist regime that has been at the heart of every social programming nightmare for the past five years: First-year Harvard graduates are generally ill-equipped to manage the minutiae surrounding oversight of an entire campus’s large-scale social events. From navigating thorny contracts to responsibly allocating a six-figure budget at a notoriously decentralized University, the position’s responsibilities are complex and demanding enough to challenge even a veteran professional event planner...
Although the College Events Board and FYSC exist nominally to help the Fun Czar in planning campus-wide events, the Administration empowers the overstretched Czar with real control of all social programming. A case in point: The CEB is not allowed to enter into any contracts surrounding campus events or even have much to do with their scheduling. In years past, they have been told simply that certain events must occur each year, left only to devise the frilly details of the gatherings. The iron fist of social programming is entrusted only to recent Harvard undergraduates, as the administration feels...
Insider reasoning and concentration of power might make sense if the Fun Czar were both competent and, well, fun. Unfortunately, the position has gone lately to those who focused primarily on endearing themselves to University Hall staffers during the job hunt. All six of the previous Fun Czars have been white students, and lately they’ve been cut from the Crimson Key/House Committee/Harvard Concert Commission cloth—students who found more delight in the now-defunct Disney Singalong program than they did in increased funding for Yardfest artists. To compound the problem, this general wonkiness has been...
Read "Obama's Health Czar: Behind the Scenes but Leading the Charge...