With a mere 300 alumni signatures, Ron K. Unz ’83 and four other alumni launched the failed “Free Harvard, Fair Harvard” campaign for the Board of Overseers over this past spring. The campaign argued for abolishing undergraduate tuition and increasing public data on Harvard admissions practices, claiming that Asian-American students were being discriminated against by affirmative action. The platform received almost immediate criticism from President Faust and a group of nearly 500 alumni soon followed Faust’s lead.

Unz’s high-profile petition campaign drew attention to more than tuition and admissions, however. It sparked renewed interest in the election process and signature qualification. The voting population for the Board of Overseers includes approximately 265,000 alumni who have received a degree from Harvard, but until recently, only 201 signatures were required to gain a spot on the ballot as a petition candidate. In the aftermath of this election, the University will move to raise the bar for petition candidates to one percent of the that population— 2,650 signatures. Candidates will also be limited to those who have received a degree from the University, and the University will move its voting and signature processes online.

Traditionally, alumni mailed in paper ballots, and signatures for petition candidates had to be collected on official, watermarked forms. The move towards digitalization will remedy these anachronisms. Given the Board of Overseers' crucial role in the University’s present and future, we strongly support these technology-guided initiatives and believe they will increase turnout. However, we do not believe that these changes justify the tenfold increase in requirements for petition signatures.

Despite the unconventional nature of Unz’s platform, discouraging the input of outside voices will harm the University in the long run. Overseer election turnout has traditionally been low, with only 35,870 ballots cast in the 2016 election, though the extent to which digitalization will aid voter turnout remains unclear. The jump of the petition signature requirement to 2,650—approximately seven percent of last year’s vote total— could therefore prove too high a barrier for petition candidates in the future.

While we did not support the "Free Harvard, Fair Harvard" ticket, we see the value in petition candidates to help to spark critical discussion on issues overlooked by the Harvard-suggested candidates. While it is important to have a threshold that prevents unpopular candidates from crowding the election, it is also important to recognize that it is nearly-impossible for an outsider candidate to be elected. The platform of candidacy serves the greater function of protest and should not be subject to unnecessarily high restrictions.

We therefore propose that the University instead adopt a signature threshold of one percent of the previous election’s turnout. This will allow the requirement to fluctuate with the number of actual voters, reasonably filtering candidates while still allowing for inclusiveness. In the meantime, we hope the University will continue to adopt initiatives that increase alumni engagement and election participation. Greater alumni participation will benefit the operation of the University whose people—students, faculty, and alumni—are its greatest asset.