Zhou acknowledges the difficulty but says Cheung would “never be happy only doing one job.”

“He always wants to look outward to see how he can help other people,” she says.

A HAVEN FOR STUDENT REPRESENTATIVES

A number of Harvard undergraduates have begun encouraging fellow students to re-register as Cambridge voters by the October 14 deadline.

But Matthew Young ’12 says he has been disappointed so far by the response from the Harvard community.

“Harvard students don’t really seem to care about sending one of their own to Cambridge City Council,” says Young, who said he finds students to be very interested in direct public service—like volunteerism and philanthropy—but less inclined to engage in local politics.

Unlike Cambridge, which elects representatives to its nine City Council seats by citywide vote, New Haven votes for its thirty aldermen by district. As a result, Yale, which occupies a large portion of the city’s first ward, has historically been successful in putting an Eli on the board.

Two former Yale students who served as New Haven aldermen have donated to the Cheung campaign. One of them, Ben Healy, said that he was excited by Cheung’s campaign because he had seen firsthand the importance of bringing a student voice into city politics.

“If university students care about questions of public safety, if they care about development around the campus, if they care about the schools around them, having someone who could speak for that and who is accessible to a student population is just very powerful,” Healy says. “The best of the Yale aldermen have learned how to push the city and the university at the same time...I think that’s what Leland represents. That’s what his campaign is trying to emphasize.”

—Staff writer Evan T.R. Rosenman can be reached at erosenm@fas.harvard.edu.