By the time this op-ed goes to press, new Student Assembly leadership will have been elected. Just who will be in that leadership isn't certain as I write.
But at least two things are certain. One, turnout in the election will be laughably low. And two, regardless of who wins, it won't make a damn bit of difference for Dartmouth students.
This year's election has been the usual comedy of errors that marks most things the Assembly lays its hands on, and not just because of the usual petty sniping between camps and laughable "controversy" over who did or did not put a poster up 17 seconds before the official start of the campaign. This time around, the main sideshow attraction has been the "platforms" of the candidates themselves.
What follows is a condensed summary of what passes for meaningful campaigning when it comes to Assembly elections. Being an Assembly "insider" or "outsider" -- it's unclear which of the two is supposed to be good -- matters more than having any actual ideas. Getting HBO and ESPN-U for campus cable seems like a burning issue. Each candidate professes undying love for the Greek system, and pledges to protect the Greeks from "the menace" -- whatever the menace may be.
And so forth, ad nauseam.
By contrast, an actual, meaningful platform for a student body presidential candidate might look something like this:
First, demand that the College administration make its operating budget public each year, and publish that budget for examination by the whole student body. With the price of a Dartmouth education so staggeringly high, and with tuition rising each year -- come Hell or high water -- students have the right to know how their money is being spent. Furthermore, when the College administration trots-out "budgetary constraints" as a debate-killing justification for so many major decisions, students have no way to evaluate the quality of Dartmouth's administrative leadership without access to the College budget.
Second, take a productive stance on relations between the Greek system and the College as a whole. On the one hand, that means fighting to protect Greek houses -- which, like it or not, are the most important student organizations on this campus -- from meaningless or penal College regulations, such as the Office of Residential Life dictum that members of Greek houses that do not fill their physical plants with residents will be prohibited from participating in room draw. At the same time, the Assembly ought to insist on high standards of behavior from Dartmouth's Greeks, and must not hesitate to denounce houses that make pledges give lap dances, divert charity donations to pay for programming or send student after student away in ambulances to be treated for dangerous levels of alcohol consumption.
Third, preserve the strength and breadth of Dartmouth's curriculum. The Assembly already collects student input on courses and professors, in the form of student course reviews. Those reviews ought to be used to monitor proposed changes in the curriculum. If courses -- or even whole departments, like speech and human biology -- that receive strong student reviews are targeted for elimination, the Assembly ought to insist on their retention. If professors that students rate as fine teachers are considering leaving Dartmouth, the Assembly ought to pressure the College and academic departments to retain them.
Finally, and most importantly, completely overhaul the Assembly itself. As currently constituted, the Student Assembly is a toothless, impotent joke, a dog-and-pony show without the clout to make any of these other proposals a reality, or the credibility to get the student body to care in the first place. This state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue. If the Assembly is to fulfill its only real meaningful function -- to serve as a voice for students in College affairs -- it needs to reorganize itself completely, to change from a glorified programming committee slash junior varsity debate club into a dynamic, cohesive body capable of exerting real influence in the running of the College.
Now that's the kind of platform I'd vote for. More importantly, it's the kind of platform that might make Dartmouth take notice of and interest in its student government in the first place.
