Gene Corbin

This meeting makes me think about the importance of good leadership in our country and on this campus. Let's thank Dhruv and Ava for their leadership, and for all the candidates bravely putting themselves out there in this election.

Ground Rules

Time limits announced per-question. Keep it civil, and try to generate good ideas.

Opening Statements

Shaiba / Danny

We're here to open Harvard. That means opening social space, opening dialogue on mental health and sexual assault, and putting students in those discussions, and making the first-year experience feel like a home.

We'll hit the ground running, because for the past year, we've been working on this issues. We've lobbied the administration and planned parties. We've been crafting a bystander intervention program.

All of these issues are intertwined because students feel like they don't belong on this campus. You don't belong when you have nothing to do on a Friday, when you need to go to MHS for mental health services, or if 20% of the women in your class have been sexually assaulted

Will / Will

For a very long time, three issues have plagued our campus: mental health, sexual assault, and social spaces. But now they've come to a head. It's only now that we're trying to discuss them, and we need to make sure that our efforts don't disappear, people don't forget that they exist, and that they don't forget that they have solutions.

We are two people who have done a lot of good on the UC, and elsewhere on the campus. We're not trying to be the UC

Bar "Issues of Varsity Athletics" on the varsity athletes' platform, the only difference between the three tickets' platforms this year is that the Rather/Banks ticket collapses sexual assault and mental health into the single issue "Open Dialogue", while adding the plank "Open the Yard", read "Freshman Life".

I'd be inclined to write this off as a matter of branding and rhetoric rather than ideology, except that at the Crimson-hosted UC Crossfire debate, Danny Banks tried to make hay out of it -- claiming proudly that "We are the only platform with a third of our platform dedicated to freshmen."

I don't think you can believe that those words mean anything if you don't also believe that they mean other planks holding less importance. The time, energy, and political capital of the UC presidency is limited, and if you believe that freshman social life deserves attention at the expense of mental health on campus, then your candidates are Rather and Banks.

But I'm voting Greenlaw/Morris.

(1a)

Will Morris, before the UC vice presidency crossed his mind, has been writing eloquently on the chords of discontent often heard on our campus; perhaps you remember Dear Andy?

I hope this letter to you will help change things for others. I hope it will convince someone who is like me all those years ago to find the support that they need. I hope it will encourage someone like me now—too busy with their midterms, their finals, and their papers—to check in on a friend. I hope it will encourage us as a community to fight against the stigma surrounding mental

Opening Statements

Nick / Jeff

We were both disenchanted with Harvard as a whole...but then we realized how lucky we are, and how many things are wrong at Harvard. We can do better as a community, and we can do better as a whole.

Our platform stands on:

• Mental Health
• Sexual Assault
• Social Spaces
• Issues surrounding Varsity Athletics

Shaiba / Danny

Opening Harvard includes making truly inclusive social spaces, putting students in high-level administrative decisions, and re-imagining the first-year experience.

• Social Spaces
• Sexual Assault & Mental Health
• First-Year Life

Will / Will

People complain about social spaces, put on a band-aid solution it, and forget about it. People complain about sexual assault, put on a band-aid solution it, and forget about it. People complain about mental health when we hear that someone hurt themselves, but then we just put on a band-aid solution it, and forget about it. It's time to do something about these issues.

• Social Spaces
• Sexual Assault
• Mental Health

Policy Proposals: Sexual Assault

Nick / Jeff

Sexual assault: Mandatory beginning-of-year OSAPR/DAPA training.

Social spaces: Expedited party forms, allowing you to register parties 30min ahead of time.

Shaiba / Danny

Shifting the sexual assault dialogue from reactionary to preventative.

It's important that the administration adopts an affirmative consent policy.

Will

I was asked on Monday by a friend if I was going to write about the goings-on at Yale. I will at some point, but now's not the time.

A little more than two and a half years ago, our school spent a day on lockdown after a twenty-one-year-old shot a police officer at MIT and drove through our campus on his way to Watertown, where he would eventually be captured by police.

We stayed in our dorms, not knowing whether he was just outside the door. He probably wasn't anywhere near campus, the rumors went, but better to keep the doors locked, just to be sure. I lived just next door to my friends, but I didn't dare to step outside for the ten seconds it would have taken me to get from my door to theirs.

I've written before about the moment that we raised our voices together, after the campus had begun to open up again, but I haven't said much about the terror of that day we spent inside.

It seems illogical now, with the benefit of hindsight, but we were worried that we'd hear gunshots at any moment. Everyone tensed up when we heard another police siren go screaming passed. People offered couches to sleep on to strangers because no one wanted to go outside.

But I don't claim to know what it feels like to be black on Mizzou's campus right now. When we locked our doors in fear, we were afraid together. I don't know what it's like for a piece of my identity to be under attack, because when my school was locked down, we came together as Harvard students. I don't

Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death,—
  sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,—
    pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.

We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,—
          our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe.

He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed
                shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,
                  we whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
  We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
    No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers.

We laughed,—knowing that better men would come,
          and greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
            he wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

— Wilfred Owen

As always, there's a lot more stuff that I enjoyed reading this month on Reading Feed. Do check it out!

1

Leah Libresco is the single person who I believe has the best practical ideas about how to be a human being in this world.

(This video -- of her speaking about her new book -- isn't embeddable, but if you click, it will open in a new tab.)

It is something of an issue for me that certain significant bits of her deeply-considered epistemic beliefs disagree with my much-less-deeply-considered epistemic beliefs. When I put it that way, it sounds like there's an obvious, easy fix, and when you dereference what it is that I'm talking about, calling it "an obvious, easy fix" sounds...odd.

This was the beginning of a much longer post, but I realized that I have absolutely zero idea where that post is going, so instead: Here, have a great video by a math nerd explaining her experience converting to Catholicism. Even if you disagree with her metaphysical propositions, I think her approach to grappling with ideas larger than yourself is an incredibly lucid and useful framing-of-things. Maybe, hopefully, someday, I'll find the clarity to write about how I feel about the metaphysics, but in the mean time, do watch the video—it's excellent.

Elsewhere, she's been on fire all over the Internet this whole week:

• First Things | How to Strengthen Catholic Community
• Unequally Yoked | How Do You Lance a Festering Resentment?
• Fare Forward | Both/And Philanthropy (and Unequally Yoked | The People I Don't Learn to Love)

And again, even the parts which are ostensibly written for Catholics are thought-provoking reads for the

Aaronson:

I’m sensitive to the charge that divestment petitions are just meaningless sanctimony, a way for activists to feel morally pure without either making serious sacrifices or engaging the real complexities of an issue. In the end, though, that kind of meta-level judgment can’t absolve us of the need to consider each petition on its merits: if we think of a previous crisis for civilization (say, in the late 1930s), then it seems obvious that even symbolic divestment gestures were better than nothing.

What made up my mind was reading the arguments pro and con, and seeing that the organizers of this petition had a clear-eyed understanding of what they were trying to accomplish and why: they know that divestment can’t directly drive down oil companies’ stock prices, but it can powerfully signal to the world a scientific consensus that, if global catastrophe is to be averted, most of the known fossil-fuel reserves need to be left in the ground, and that current valuations of oil, gas, and coal companies fail to reflect that reality.

...

These realities [that averting more climate change requires extraordinary political will] have a counterintuitive practical implication that I wish both sides understood better. Namely, if you share my desperation and terror about this crisis, the urgent desire to do something, then limiting your personal carbon footprint should be very far from your main concern. Like, it’s great if you can bike to work, and you should keep it up (fresh air and exercise and all). But I’d say the anti-environmentalists are right that such voluntary steps are luxuries of the privileged, and will