It is time to ask, in all seriousness, why Dartmouth's Student Assembly needs to exist at all.
Nationally, there is a growing sentiment among Americans that technological forces of the modern age shall leave legislative and representative bodies in a state of decay, and that immediate electronic access to the United States Congress shall deliver a great blow to deliberative processes.
If that is the case nationally, then at Dartmouth the Student Assembly has long been dead.
A representative body in student government exists primarily as a place of discourse and deliberation and as a liaison between students and the college administration. Such a body also may have some immediately practical functions such as course guides and the like.
But there exist at Dartmouth College certain conditions that will not allow the Student Assembly to perform any of these functions adequately. In fact, two major factors -- the ability of individual students to reach the administration directly (supported by a ubiquitous electronic communications system) and the general apathy and amusement among the student body towards the Assembly -- are both closely related, with each factor feeding off the other in a tight cycle.
Just as fax machines, modems and voice mail systems hurt Congress's deliberations, so do BlitzMail and a responsive administration allow students to leapfrog the Assembly and deal directly with the appropriate administrative department. This in turn gives students independence from representation, leaving to the Assembly ample time for tomfoolery, and providing more reason for the student body to view the institution with scorn.
Viewing the Assembly as a liaison means not simply that the students should find use in the body, but also that the Board of Trustees and the rest of the Administration should be able to use it as a microcosm of student attitude, or at least as a forum in which student ideas gradually unfold.
However, because the students do not find the Assembly of any particular use (this is not the representatives' fault), and because the body's antics often elicit derision rather than reverence (this is), the administration cannot use it as any gauge at all.
Thus, neither the student body nor the administration feels an overpowering need for the Assembly as a medium, since both communicate directly with each other without the SA.
How exactly the two entities work together needs to be clarified somewhat. Essentially, any effort with the administration that students initiate on their own behalf -- whether it be for their housing applications, for protesting the freshman dorms plan, for doing community service or for bringing certain entertainment to campus -- is done, by definition without representation. Without the Student Assembly.
That is, these efforts are undertaken either by the students as individuals or by the students acting through their organizations. The housing application may be handled through the Office of Residential Life. The freshman dorms protest, through the Conservative Union. Community service, through the Tucker Foundation. And a comedian may be brought to campus by the Programming Board. (Ever received a blitz from Linda Kennedy asking whom to invite to campus? She never asked SA!)
This is where an understanding of Student Assembly elections becomes essential. Because all that separates the Assembly from other, more effective organizations is an election process, one that is used by the SA as a claim to a mandate or some other sort of legitimacy. The problem is that the charade of student body elections continues without anyone asking what degree of legitimacy such a process in reality grants the body.
Theoretically, an Assembly election would imply that the student body has allowed a particular group of candidates to represent Dartmouth's students and deliberate on their behalf. But does an Assembly election produce any such legitimacy? Because the institution is regarded as so unnecessary to begin with, does anyone really pay much attention to these elections, outside of the Assembly itself?
Probably not. In reality what happens is this: The students and Administration work out their own business throughout the year; suddenly, a few Assembly shenanigans occur, and they are ignored; elections are held, and the students vote; and the students and administration resume working with each other directly.
Few care about Student Assembly elections.
So if the Assembly attempts to serve Dartmouth students, but the College's various clubs do a much more effective job without requiring an election process, why should the Assembly be allowed to claim some sort of higher ground, when in fact the election results are in themselves questionable? The truth of the matter is that the Student Assembly can be done without.
Offices like that of Residential Life, for example, claim they would give the directly voiced concerns of an individual student as much time and consideration as they would the Assembly.
That means when members of the Assembly -- who the students picked in a process that was dubious to begin with -- passed a resolution in response to the Office of Residential Life's proposed Coed Fraternity Sorority housing policy, there was in fact attached to this event little or no significance.
So while no one quite feels a need for the Assembly, because it fails as a liaison, there is also no need to attempt lending the body some legitimacy through the election process. Indeed, the elections game, which produces the idea that somehow the student body is complicit in the Assembly's uselessness, is a worthless -- even detrimental -- aspect of the Assembly's existence.
Student Assembly, freed from the illegitimate process of voting, can be downshifted into a simple debating society for the deliberation of pressing issues -- into a normal club that will not be scorned, and may even become as effective as the best student organizations on campus.
Someone else can take care of those nifty course guides.
