Invigorating the Student Assembly: The Candidates, Reviewed

by Alexander Wilson

It’s election time again at Dartmouth. Posters are hanging, of both the standard and inane varieties. Rhetoric is flying, some more blimpish in its hot-air capacity than others. Students, at least some of them, are actually thinking about the Student Assembly. And the Daily Dartmouth Editorial Board has excoriated the Assembly for its failure to change the shape of the campus, continuing its annual exercise of the pot calling the kettle black.

Startling enough, despite its abysmal ignorance of the actual workings of the Assembly and the College, and the total lack of any suggestions about how the Student Assembly might work better, the Daily Dartmouth did stumble into an accurate assessment of it. The truth is that the Student Assembly is totally illegitimate and ineffective. If students are to have any meaningful ability to direct the future path of the College, it must be changed radically, and as soon as possible.

I write this having served as a member of the Assembly’s Executive Committee in 7 out of the last 9 terms, and all of the last 7 non-summer terms. More than half my Dartmouth career has been spent in the Assembly’s leadership, and I have as much invested in its success as any student. Reality, however, cannot be denied, and the reality is that the student body is ill-served by its imitation of a government.

The Assembly has no significant influence over College policy. For every minor improvement it persuades the administration to grant students, usually after years of lobbying, five highly controversial and damaging policies are initiated with at best a facade of student involvement to cover the blatant authoritarianism of Parkhurst. Most students on this campus continue to view the Assembly correctly as having little impact on their lives. Not even close to half of all students vote in Assembly elections.

Even if all students did all vote, it would mean very little in the grand scheme of things, given the remarkable anti-democratic structure of student government at Dartmouth. Elected members currently make up considerably less than half of all Assembly members. The majority of those who vote on behalf of students on important issues were chosen by no one but themselves. Whether the Assembly acts for students who didn’t choose it despite that fact or cripples itself by being careful not to take unequivocal stands on the issues because of it is unimportant. Neither approach should be an acceptable form of student governance at the College.

The Daily Dartmouth and much of the campus seem content to blame the Assembly’s leadership for its miserable performance, or to write the Assembly off entirely. The former reveals only ignorance or misunderstanding of the problem. The latter entails resigning ourselves to remaining impotent as Dartmouth’s entire social, residential, and academic structure is being recreated. Most Student Assembly representatives have similarly flawed views. There is a strong tendency to believe either that there is no way to gain power except if the administration will give it to them, or that there is nothing really wrong—that things could be better but this is pretty damn good—revealing a de facto acceptance of impotence.

These mindsets must be replaced if student government is to be effective, and only effective student government can provide students with a meaningful impact on College policy. Rallying at Parkhurst is all well and good, but without a framework in which to operate all the speeches in the world will accomplish absolutely nothing. To that end a new Student Assembly is necessary, and a new mindset to go with it, both for its members and the campus at large.

The first and most important change to make is the basis of Assembly representation. The current thinking at SA is that the more eclectic the body is the more representative the organization will be. This is quite simply the wrong type of representation. The Assembly must be a government for the students, and the only way to do that is through direct elections for all voting members. Including non-elected students in some form of associate capacity would be advantageous, but the only individuals speaking for the student body should be those elected by the students.

Once this is accomplished, the Assembly must adopt a more direct attitude towards the College administration. Far too often the Assembly merely presents reports that document student opinion in all its facets. This is perhaps a necessity when "representatives" are aware that they have been empowered to speak on behalf of no one, but it makes any attempt to influence College policy futile. The administration can always find a minority opinion that supports its predilections and hold their decision up as being in tune with the wishes of some of the students. The function of government is to lead; while we would insist that an elected Assembly consult us, we will also need it to decide for us on those issues the average student lacks the time to analyze thoroughly. That is what the Assembly cannot do now, and until it does it will not fulfill its putative responsibilities.

The Assembly must also end its fixation on student services as a raison d’être for the organization. Services are indisputably valuable and useful to many, if not all, students. Providing them, however, is insignificant in comparison to SA’s larger purpose of representing students on issues of College policy. Services should be delegated to a some autonomous body under the SA umbrella, without electoral requirements. This would allow the Assembly as a whole to devote its full attention to its primary goals, and would eliminate its ability to excuse its larger failings by pointing to the services it provides.

Finally, the Assembly must begin to mobilize students, alumni, faculty, and administrators on behalf of crucial student interests. In the case of students, a far more centralized structure must be created. The average student takes his cue on many issues from the organizations to which they belong, organizations which rarely cooperate with one another or the Assembly. In order to craft a powerful student role in College affairs, those groups must come together in an organized fashion.

Student organizations with similar interests, be they cultural, religious, Greek, or what have you, need to be brought together under umbrella councils. This would allow them to coordinate united action by their members, and to work in conjunction with other councils, to advance the cause of student power. Such groups already exist in the form of Co-ed Fraternity Sorority Council and the varsity teams’ Captain’s Council. The Assembly, at least through its president, is the only group on campus in a position to encourage this type of organization and to direct the combined efforts of the various councils. It must begin to do so.

Students, however, will always find it difficult to achieve power without help from groups with more influence. Some members of the faculty and administration undoubtedly hold views on certain issues that are more in line with the students’ interests than the majority of faculty and administrators. These factions need to be cultivated by the Assembly and supported against the other factions in their respective groups. An organized lobbying effort is long overdue to strengthen the students’ voice in the internal debates of the other segments of the Dartmouth community.

Most importantly, however, the alumni of the College must be brought into alliance with the students. On a vast range of issues, the views of students and alumni are far closer together than either are with the administration. Yet Dartmouth student government has never reached out to them in any fashion for support. The alumni are the single most powerful constituency at the College by virtue of their pocketbooks and that power must be tapped. In fact, the Assembly’s largest priority should be to inform alumni of and involve them in the debates over the future of the College. It is essential that concerned alumni are actively solicited for their support of the student position.

The types of changes just described would require a full scale renovation of student government on this campus. The structure, mindset, philosophy, and operating procedure of the Student Assembly would have to be fundamentally altered. Without such changes I have no doubt the sad pattern of inefficacy over which I have helped preside will continue, and students will find, to their detriment, that they have a College that does not resemble the one they thought they were joining, and that had been changed, for the worse, without their views or needs being considered.

I would like to say that the current crop of candidates for Student Body President and Vice-President inspires me with great hope. Unfortunately, I am afraid this group of budding student leaders lacks the vision or the understanding of reality, or both, required to reform the Assembly.

Among the candidates for President, Molly Stutzman ’02 is a long time member of the Assembly and Executive Committee and an unsuccessful candidate last year for Vice-President. Having worked with her for the past two years I have no doubts that she would run the Assembly with a sure hand and achieve as much as her predecessors, perhaps even more. Yet she is a classic example of the current Assembly mindset, firmly believing that while it could do more, the Assembly is, at root, legitimate and effective. To reiterate, the Assembly is not legitimate, it is not effective, and if it is not reworked, it will continue in that inglorious tradition.

There have been some hopeful signs of reformist tendencies from Ms. Stutzman of late, both in terms of student services autonomy and in a more purely elective membership structure. However, her record mitigates against relying on her to make any truly major changes. And on the wider front of student power, her answers are the same old rhetoric. She said, "We need to take the stance from the beginning of the year that ‘forgetting to take student input’ into consideration will not be acceptable." Strong words, good words, but what if they are ignored? Not much I suspect.

The only other serious Presidential candidate is Mike Sevi ’02. I omit discussion of Ted White ’02, who appears to be trying to replace the absent Jack-O candidate with a one man joke campaign. Mr. Sevi on the other hand is quite serious, as is his running-mate Aly Rahim ‘02. Messrs. Sevi and Rahim have both grasped the essential madness of a non-elective student government and accurately identified both SA’s overreliance on student services and its overfixation on what are essentially minor issues.

Mr. Rahim stated that "Student government is an organ of advocacy. Real and fundamental issues that concern the student body at large must be the foundation of the assembly agenda." I am in full agreement with him.

However, the total lack of SA experience between the two shows clearly in many of their solutions to the problems they identify. Their entire plan for dealing with administration is to call for more power once they have reformed the Assembly’s membership structure. While I am all for such reform, any student who has worked with the administration will be aware that lack of SA legitimacy is not the issue. Power will not be given away by the administration, it will have to be seized. For that, Messrs. Sevi and Rahim seem to have no plan.

According to their platform, they also intend to restructure the Assembly through a Rapid Action Committee made up of campus leaders. It would be reassuring if there was any indication that they realized the necessity for convincing three quarters of Assembly members to vote in favor of any changes in order to implement them. This requirement has long stymied reformers with devotion. Moreover, even their basic reforms are of somewhat dubious quality. Their platform calls for an elective system with special gerrymandered constituencies to ensure that "every ideology, ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic group present on this campus will be accurately represented." For all my belief in elections, I suspect that the Assembly becoming an agent of Balkanization along every demographic line on this campus is not much of an improvement.

Running against Mr. Rahim for the Vice-Presidency are Amit Anand ’03 and Michael Newton ’04. Mr. Anand, a member of the Assembly Executive Committee last year has long been a leader among those resistant to structural reform on the Assembly, and he has offered nothing thus far during the campaign that indicates he will do anything differently from those who came before him, regardless of their manifest failures. He said, "in the end, we’ll only gain legitimacy with the administration if students perceive us as an effective institution." Much like previous Assembly members and candidates, Anand views SA’s legitimacy as a function of its effectiveness, without recognizing that the issue of legitimacy is intricately connected to how the Assembly is chosen, and that effectiveness is largely a result of legitimacy, and not the other way around. He is, at this time, exactly what the Assembly needs least.

Mr. Newton, on the other hand, shows a fair grasp of the issues, much more so than most Assembly members, of which he is one currently. While unfortunately committed to the principle of "inclusion" for everyone as members of the Assembly, which has deprived the students of true elected representation for years, he appears to understand most of its other failings. He believes student services should be given more autonomy, that alumni, faculty and administrators should be more actively lobbied, and that student organizations should work far more closely together.

Mr. Newton said, "I think that groups need to come together under a single representative umbrella that will provide the forum for true discussion. That way real positive change can be made and the Assembly should be at the center of that."

In the end, the pickings for students are quite slim. No candidate has both a commitment to the type of major overhaul of student government necessary on this campus and a realistic plan for how to achieve it. We are given for the most part a choice between a continuation of our current impotence vis-à-vis the administration or a pipe dream of reform that is neither entirely sound nor fully thought-out. It is, decidedly, an unfortunate election to have to be a part of.

It may be a mere conceit of mine that some readers might be interested enough in my thoughts to know whom I plan to vote for. However, on the off chance that my beliefs may be useful to some in making the choice between the lesser of several evils, I will indulge that conceit.

In the Vice-Presidential race I believe Mr. Newton is by far the most likely to be effective. While his reformist impulses are far from being comprehensive enough, they are definitely there, unlike Mr. Anand’s. Unlike Mr. Rahim, he appears to have thought them through to their conclusion and have a sense of how they could be made reality.

In the Presidential race the choice is more difficult. Ms. Stutzman represents perhaps the very best of the current Assembly model. But that model has been proven flawed far too often. Mr. Sevi, while recognizing the need for drastic change, has presented plans that far too often are unrealistic, unworkable, and even undesirable. Nor does he appear to understand the need to do more than merely change the Assembly and assume that will be enough to attain power for the students. It is, in the end, a choice I would rather not have to make. In the end, however, I believe Mr. Sevi to be the wiser choice. Reforming an entrenched and failed student government structure is far harder than revising a new and failed one. Also, if Mr. Newton were also elected, he would be likely to moderate Mr. Sevi’s overly radical ideas and provide a breadth of understanding of the power structure at the College. There is no Vice-Presidential candidate who is similarly able to radicalize Ms. Stutzman.

Whichever candidates emerge triumphant will face a daunting challenge: To establish a new and powerful student government to carry our interests into the deepest corners of Parkhurst, or join the long line of their predecessors who achieved little more than a resume bullet. The best wishes of all sensible students should be with them.