SLAM followed its November 2 meeting with a trip to the Lowell Junior Common Room for a meeting with Evelyn Hammonds, Dean of Harvard College, on aligning our priorities with budget cutbacks. Although it was not indicated in the email publicizing the feedback session, Dean Hammonds did not show up. Present instead were Suzie Nelson, Dean of Student Life, a Lowell House tutor, Lowell housemasters, and four student members of the Budget Cut Task Force. Dean Hammonds’s spontaneous absence raised initial questions about the seriousness with which the administration took the meeting.

Dean Nelson and her colleagues stressed the importance of mechanisms that the College has set up by which to solicit feedback from undergraduates regarding ideas on budget cuts. The main method in place at this point is the Idea Bank, a program borrowed from MIT through which students can contribute and vote on their most favored ideas for how to save money in Harvard’s current time of financial “need.” The Idea Bank will close in two weeks, at which point the most positively rated ideas will go to “working groups.” These working groups will process the most fruitful ideas into recommendations for FAS to be submitted at the end of the semester. Dean Nelson expressed frustration that input to the Idea Bank has dwindled over the past couple of weeks and that Dean Hammonds’s three meetings over the weekend were not better attended.

Many meeting participants, however, questioned the legitimacy of the administration’s attempts to incorporate student feedback in its decisions. Abby Brown pointed out that students see that vehicles for information such as the Idea Bank exist, but they are skeptical about where the information will go once collected. Lack of attendance at the events, she and Megan Shutzer suggested, is not because students have nothing to contribute, but rather because they are not confident that their ideas will, at the end of the day, be considered seriously by the administration. Accountability to students, then, is needed at two levels: in determining which of the working groups’ suggestions are most palatable, and in making sure that the best of those suggestions are actually implemented by the administration.

In addition, some students have questions about broader issues of accountability and decision-making structures within the university. Zach Hughes asked about the Harvard Management Company’s response to this financial crisis, wondering if the risky investment processes HMC engaged in would be reformed so that we do not have to deal with such extreme changes in finances in the future. Dean Nelson skirted the question and responded by stressing the need to cut costs in small ways on the level of day-to-day operations within FAS. A culture of sacrifice, it was agreed upon by the directors of the meeting, is needed to cut costs. However, Lowell House master Diana Eck called into question the very notion of saving $120 million in small material savings such as energy efficiency measures—this was met with reluctant agreement by Dean Nelson.

Eck and fellow House Master Dorothy Austin also candidly discussed an alternative money-saving solution: faculty pay cuts. Immediately following the endowment crash, faculty sentiment drifted toward a feeling of solidarity over possible 1-2% pay cuts. According to Eck and Austin, Dean Michael Smith squashed this initiative among concerned faculty members.

Megan Shutzer also expressed concern over Harvard’s role in Allston. When asked who has decision-making power in the area, Dean Nelson said she was not able to provide any information but would get back to Megan on who might be contactable for information on this issue.

The SLAM members who attended this meeting came away feeling that the way in which the administration interacts with students regarding issues of feedback on budget cut issues has not changed much. While we now have a better knowledge of the Idea Bank and its context, as well as the working groups, we felt that the administration trivialized the meeting by sending representatives who themselves were not adequately informed about the power structures that govern the university at large. We must now choose whether to act by organizing an intensive effort to manifest our priorities through the avenues that the university has set up or by exerting pressure in more concerted, direct ways on the administration.