Word: fees
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...April referendum. After a contentious campaign, undergraduates voted to increase the Student Activities Fee—an optional termbill charge that makes up the bulk of the council’s revenue—by an unprecedented and excessive 114 percent. Undergraduate voters refused, however, to make the fee mandatory on student termbills...
From the outset, the campaign to raise the termbill fee seemed ill-conceived and hastily thought out. Not a single council presidential candidate, campaigning merely months before the termbill referendum, ever hinted at a fee hike; and the initial proposal lacked any clearly defined plan as to how the council would handle a dramatically increased budget. Nevertheless, Undergraduate Council President Matthew W. Mahan ’05 and a very devoted group of representatives within his ranks set out on a seemingly surreptitious route of ramming the proposed bill through, without ever consulting the student body...
...President Matthew A. Steinert ‘06 tried to justify the fee in an e-mail by blaming McGrath Studios. “In order to eliminate the $10 fee we would need to be willing to find a photographer to take pictures for FREE,” he wrote. In fact, owner Bob McGrath has said he would be happy to provide free photo sittings, as he does at Boston College and Harvard Law School...
Though McGrath Studios collects the fee, it in fact goes back to the yearbook in the form of a kickback for being the exclusive senior portrait provider to Harvard undergraduates. McGrath Studios charges students $10 and then pays the yearbook $25. (They call it a “rebate.”) In effect, the yearbook charges each student $10 just to be included. McGrath pays HYP a net $15 per student for the exclusive rights to the 1400 senior portraits...
Steinert naively thinks that the two hundred students who do not appear in the yearbook are avoiding photos for some other reason. “If a student can’t pay the fee we haven’t heard anything of it,” he said. If this is the case, students who oppose the fee must show it. Undergraduates should reject this fee just as they rejected a mandatory student activities fee, and show their opinions by emailing yearbook@hcs.harvard.edu...