The new year here at Dartmouth has hardly begun and already there's more bickering going on in the wonderful world of campus politics. For the uninitiated, this sort of squabbling is unfortunately a sort of revered tradition in this arena; the inevitable media war has already started and will go on nonstop through next year's elections.
Inevitably, the Nominations Committee is the source of a great deal of controversy and is usually a major battleground when the political infighting takes place.
This year, the first shot was fired Oct. 11 by Assembly member Kishan Putta '96, when in a column in The Dartmouth ("Poor Start for the Assembly") he questioned the recently approved Student Assembly Symposium and the policies of the Nominations Committee concerning the allotment of seats to non-elected members who had served on Summer Assembly.
The symposium was put together over the summer by the Intellectual Life Committee, which was chaired by Shakari Cameron '96, one of the four individuals awarded a seat this fall by the Nominations Committee.
I serve as chair of that committee now but had no role myself in planning the symposium. I voted to appropriate the money for the symposium because I thought it was a coherent set of programs -- panel discussions and other events in addition to the now infamous main speakers -- Elaine Kim and Angela Davis -- that addressed a wide variety of issues of gender relations in institutions of higher education.
Six elected Assembly members disagreed, Putta among them, and the final vote was 10 in favor, six against. And the margin was not due to nominations "stacking" either -- the motion would have passed (6 to 6 with President Danielle Moore '95 voting in favor) anyway, even without the four new members.
Symposium opponents have cited the fact that the SA's remaining funds would be lower than is customary at this time of year, and much lower than last year. However, this year's SA leadership, both the "liberals" and "conservatives," have committed themselves to strict limitations on ad hoc program spending. In other words, the SA will not function as an alternate Programming Board to give funding such as last year's $200 for the Conservative Union's Ronald Reagan Birthday Party.
True, it's just $200 out of a $35,000 budget, but when every organization expects SA funding, those numbers really start to add up. And if the SA in general agrees, then there will be no more of a fiscal crunch than there was last year, despite the fact that the SA is instituting new student service projects as well as bringing back the SA Course Guide.
Some claim that the SA has "spent 75 percent of its money already." It may have committed that amount to projects already planned, but that is very different from literally spending 75 percent of its money over three weeks.
Much of that money (the symposium, the Undergraduate Publications Fund, etc.) has been appropriated but not spent, as compared with previous years, when the SA sometimes would spend its money late in the year just for the sake of spending; that is when it would fund random programming events on an ad hoc basis for lack of anything else to do with its money.
Having dispelled the myth of a fiscally-out-of-control Student Assembly, it is time to deal with the controversy surrounding the Committee on Procedure concerning the SA's membership policies. Putta asserted that the Assembly members in question had a conflict of interest in volunteering to serve on this committee.
The Committee on Procedure was called to address a key constitutional issue concerning membership policy and not to investigate either the new members or anyone on the Nominations Committee, including SA Vice-President Rukmini Sichitiu '95, who chairs the Nominations Committee.
The central constitutional issue is whether or not Summer Assembly meetings count as General Assembly meetings. Sichitiu says yes and Putta says no. I prefer not to say what exactly the constitution says, other than to say I think it is unclear, because I honestly couldn't tell you. I'm going by the letter of the proverbial law because I have no more right to interpret the "spirit" of what the SA Constitution says than anyone else does.
To quote the SA Constitution, in Article XI, Section 3, Paragraph A, one of the responsibilities of the Summer Assembly is "to function in place of the Assembly that does not meet during the summer term." Does that mean "... the Assembly, which does not meet summer term?"
The passage as it is written is vague and does not specify whether or not Summer Assembly meetings are General Meetings, and nowhere in Article III (titled "General Meetings") does it specify whether or not General Meetings take place during all four terms.
There is obviously a clear disagreement; thus, there is a constitutional ambiguity over whether applications should have been given to the four new members (plus a handful of others, whose applications were deferred). A strong case could be made for either side.
One-third of the voting members present disagreed with the decisions of the Nominations Committee; therefore, Putta and five other voting members called the Committee on Procedure. To imply that some sort of conspiracy to subvert the SA Constitution is in the works is ludicrous.
I would be remiss, however, if I failed to mention that most of the people who voted to call the Committee on Procedure had opposed the symposium motion earlier that evening, and that the four women who had been given voting rights by the Nominations Committee all voted in favor of the symposium motion. Whether or not that is coincidental, I won't speculate.
I should also point out that the four women whose memberships may be placed in doubt by the Committee on Procedure had already withdrawn their names from consideration of being picked to serve on the Committee before the selection of members were made. This withdrawal renders irrelevant any potential conflict-of-interest issues that may have arisen from this Committee on Procedure Meeting.
As for Sichitiu, as an SA member she has as much a right to rule on a constitutional issue as any other SA member; that she has made her opinion on the matter clear should not disqualify her any more than it disqualifies SA Secretary John Honovich '97, who will chair the Committee on Procedure and has also made no secret of his opinion on the matter.
Indeed there are many such holes in the SA Constitution, particularly when it comes to membership issues, which will need to be revised and cleared up. I'm not blaming the people that worked hard to write that constitution, because it is simply not possible to foresee every conceivable potential controversy that may surface as a result of the language of a document; indeed history is filled with similar incidents concerning treaties and other documents.
The constitution will need to be reformed and it will not happen overnight; perhaps if the SA didn't have a new one every year we could create a better system with the existing one.
For now, we're stuck with this system and this impasse. It doesn't have to be this way. When I put my upside down posters all over campus last year, all saying "Turn the SA Around," I meant it and I still do.
Having tossed my two cents in on these issues, I will now mention that I shall respect whatever the finding of the Committee on Procedure concerning membership policies may be. Hopefully, this squabbling will soon be a distant memory, and the SA can get on with the business of positively impacting student life on this campus.
