Due to high member turnover from year to year, the Undergraduate Council of Students has a disproportionately large number of underclassmen. This year, there are only two seniors and five juniors among the council's 28 voting members.
UCS President Michael Glassman '09 attributed the low retention rate for juniors and seniors to the often busy schedules of upperclassmen. "It's such a big time commitment, and people either graduate, go abroad or have a thesis they want to work on," Glassman said. "That's a big one - people really want to write a thesis senior year and can't do it," he added.
Many UCS members have ambitions for moving up to executive board positions, and once they either obtain the position they wanted or are denied, they leave UCS, Glassman said. "There's sort of a culture of moving up very quickly, and people who have been on UCS for multiple years want to move up higher and higher."
The poster children for that theory could be former UCS Academic and Administrative Affairs Chair Sara Damiano '08 and former UCS Vice President Zachary Townsend '09, both of whom are no longer on the council after having major influence on policy during their tenure.
Damiano said she needed more time to focus on her thesis and that chairing the Academic and Administrative Affairs committee was the position she had truly aspired to hold. "Having held that position, I felt I had accomplished what I really wanted to on UCS," she said.
Townsend, now a Herald opinions columnist, rose through the UCS ranks but lost the Spring 2006 presidential election to John Gillis '07. He said it would have been difficult to sit on UCS in a non-executive board role after that.
"If you run for president and lose, either you come back to run again or don't come back," Townsend said. "It's difficult, after being on the executive board, to come back."
Townsend also said he could accomplish a lot of the projects he wanted to as an independent student working with council members and school administrators. "UCS is really actually pretty useful to the student body, but you don't need to be on UCS to do these things," he said.
The council was not always so underclassmen-dominated, Townsend said. "A lot of e-board members were seniors. A lot of the people who would be on it as juniors went abroad, and these people don't usually go back to UCS."
Sara Gentile '09, formerly UCS's activities and student services chair, said one of the reasons she did not return to UCS this fall was because she is going abroad in the spring. "I felt it was sort of unethical to run if I would have to resign halfway through the year," she said.
Gentile also said it can be difficult to be on UCS because the student body does not always appreciate the work done there. "It can be a little disheartening that people don't really understand what you're doing and view it negatively," she said.
Glassman echoed that, saying, "People put so much into UCS and get very little out of it. They don't really get acknowledged for it or get anything personal out of it."
Other former UCS members said their reason for leaving UCS did not have to do with external factors, but instead with UCS itself.
Lisa Gomi '10, who served as UCS secretary last fall and a representative in the spring, said she felt UCS was too disorganized. "I didn't really enjoy my experience that much ... (UCS is) largely student-run. That can mean very unorganized meetings. If it's every week, that can be very demanding and not so fun," Gomi said.
Gomi said she thinks UCS could retain members better if the meetings were more efficient. She said that would make it "less of a hassle for the members on UCS as well as more inviting and more accessible to Brown students."
"I definitely wish there were more seniors," Glassman said. "I think it's always - since I've been here - been a challenge, that there aren't enough seniors."
UCS Vice President Lauren Kolodny '08, one of the two seniors on UCS this year, said she wishes membership on the council could be more evenly distributed among class years, but that having a lot of freshmen can be beneficial to UCS, too. "It's good in the sense that underclassmen tend to have a lot of ideas and energy," she said.
Kolodny said she and Glassman tried to reach out to more upperclassmen this year, and a good number of them did run for at-large positions. Only two juniors were elected to at-large positions.
Glassman said more seniors might participate in UCS if the terms in office ran from January until December, not spring-to-spring. That way, seniors could serve on UCS and still have their senior spring free. "Senior spring, people don't really want to be committed to all these regular meetings when they want to graduate and are ready to move on," Glassman said.
Koldony agreed that might be helpful in retaining seniors. Another benefit would be that freshmen could run after they had been at Brown for a few months, she said. "It would make a lot of sense, because a lot of seniors don't want to spend their entire year on UCS," she said. "And then incoming freshmen could run after they've had some experience at Brown."
But Halley Wuertz '08, a former chair of the Admissions and Student Services Committee, said she doesn't think changing the terms would have much effect. "I think the problem is much more internal than that," Wuertz said. She said if UCS is not a productive body, people will not join.
"It's also not the coolest thing," Wuertz said. "I'm sure a lot of people leave because it's not that cool."
