Word: student
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Should the $20 Undergraduate Council fee be increased so it can return more money to the support of student groups? I have been on the fence about this question for more than a year, but I have concluded that the answer is yes. I'm not sure exactly how large the increase should be, and I'd like to find a less cumbersome process for changing it in the future, but those are details. The fee should go up. To explain the dilemma about this and why I have come out as I have, I need to give some background...
First, for this discussion I am concerned only about the part of the fee that gets returned to student groups, rather than used for council operations, social affairs and so on. I don't have a view at present as to whether the amount being used for those other ends is right...
...there have been both inflation and an increase in the number of student groups since then, so there is no question that the present fee is not adequate to meet the same needs it met 11 years ago. Nor is there any question in my mind that the money returned to student groups is (for the most part) well spent and broadly advantageous to the student community. The question is not whether more money should be spent, but how much, and where it should come from...
...minds. On the one hand, I hate to see an extra $20 fee on the bottom of a term bill already in the tens of thousands of dollars. Over the years we've dropped most of the "a la carte" items of a Harvard education and other differences among student term bills (there used to be a lot of special charges for taking certain courses, for example). We've actually eliminated several small charges over the past five years by folding them into the general costs of going to college here. It seems petty and annoying to see this...
...true that this fee constitutes the only source of support for student groups. There are grant programs from many sources within Harvard--through the Office for the Arts, through the Harvard Foundation, through the President's Public Service Fund, through the Student Activities Fund administered by Dean Illingworth and, starting next year when the separate RUS fee disappears, through the Ann Radcliffe Trust. There are also salaries and expenses for undergraduate activities that are paid directly by the College. Why shouldn't the College just take over the whole job of funding student groups...