The Coop is tied to other busness interests as well through its board of directors. Frank L. Tucker, professor emeritus at the Business School and Coop treasurer, is a director or trustee of various industrial, financial, or non-profit organizations, including the County Bank of Central Square. The Coop has done most of its financial and has received its major loans from the County Bank ever since its dispute with Harvard Trust in 1970.
Brown serves on the board of Allied Stores, whose holdings include Jordan Marsh, Boston's largest department store. General manager Davis is one of several former Jordan Marsh executives brought to the Coop by Brown.
Although there is absolutely nothing wrong with Coop directors having outside business interests, some students are critical of such ties, especially because this is a university community which prides itself in its independence from outside interests. The Coop does employ business professionals because it is not a backyard operation. But therefore it should expect hostility from the many students who have a low regard for big business.
AS THE COOP grows both financially and physically, the question of whom the Coop serves arises more frequently. Steele and others have warned that the Coop is in danger of losing its cooperative tax status since so much of its business does not involve cooperative members.
The official number of Coop members has declined 15 per cent in the past four years. This decline may very well be only a temporary phenomenon; Brown claims that past membership figures were inflated by imprecise accounting methods, and many long-time Coop members may have allowed their memberships to lapse temporarily when rebate checks all but disappeared. Nevertheless, business with non-members has been a growing percentage (albeit a very slow growth) of total Coop business in recent years. Davis estimated non-member business at 40 per cent of total business last year.
Undoubtedly, the Coop is still predominantly oriented toward students, which is to be expected. Although students make up less than half of all Coop members, they are the store's chief customers. The Coop is the largest seller of books and records in New England, products which serve the student market primarily.
However, the Coop in recent years has expanded into some areas of little interest to students. Some critics contend that the selling of such products as housewares, major appliances and expensive cameras and the refurbishing and rental of commercial space on Bow St. are not enterprises in which the Coop should be involved.
Davis defends expansion into these areas on the grounds that they are necessary to support unprofitable student-oriented enterprises. The Coop makes no profit on record sales, since it must sell records at discount prices to compete in the tough Boston market. Textbooks are notoriously unprofitable (despite the fact that the Coop has a monopoly on Harvard reading lists) since they are so bulky and may only be sold at a low 20 per cent margin. Davis asserted that the Coop would have to discontinue many of its student-oriented lines were it not for the profit it makes from lucrative ventures such as the Bow St. development.
However necessary Coop expansion into non-student areas may be, it inevitably creates resentment among students who feel that the Coop is thereby neglecting the quality of service in student-oriented areas. Complaints about textbook service were frequent enough this year to warrant the Coop's publishing a pamphlet explaining how faculty members could expedite textbook orders and help improve textbook service.
Brown may well have been accurate when he called the Coop management "totally dedicated to running this place for the students." The board of directors has little to gain for itself--the salaries of its members are independent of the size of the Coop's profits.
On the other hand, the Coop's image among students has sagged badly, and that image can only be improved by providing opportunities for more student input in Coop decisions. The results of the recent board of directors election are encouraging in that students who may have been critical of Coop practices in the past--including Steele and two Chicanos, David P. Samano '74 and Lorenzo Ybarra, who will seek to have the Farah slacks issue re-examined--have been incorporated into the Coop decision-making process.
However, students will never have a real say in management of the Coop so long as they do not have the expertise to arrive at management decisions independent of the advice of the more-experienced non-student directors. Perhaps the equalization of influence between non-student and student directors is not possible if the Coop is to continue to be run competently: But perhaps some alternatives, such as placing a limit on the number of years that a director can hold office--thereby controlling the influence of any one director--would be workable and would help bring about this equalization.
The much smaller Yale Co-op has recently implemented many reforms, including placing a limit on director tenure. If the Harvard Coop seriously wants to improve its responsiveness to students, it should carefully study the results of the reforms of its New Haven counterpart