Word: socialism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...options open. It might look outside of the Harvard undergraduate population for a more experienced event planner to hire; the additional salary expenses would be more than offset in money saved by avoiding needless monetary waste. Most radically, University Hall might even begin allowing those undergraduates elected to lead social programming to have some real authority and input in shaping the year’s social calendar. While failure to enact these suggestions might not incite a revolution in the Yard, reevaluating a position that originally stimulated campus social life might combat the torpor that has recently characterized undergraduate involvement...
...Elkins was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her book “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya,” which “realigned historians’ understanding of the final years of colonial Kenya,” Dean of Social Science Stephen M. Kosslyn said in a press release announcing Elkins’ tenure. Elkins collected much of the information contained in the book from oral histories of Kenyan survivors of British detention camps in the 1950s and wrote the book during a yearlong stay at the Radcliffe Institute between...