Does the Student Assembly matter? Does SA matter to you? Well, the answer that I hear all too often is a very quick, "No." The response to those questions that I would offer is that it can. And it should, because it has the opportunity, the potential, to be the mechanism for expressing the student perspective.
I would like to pose another question to the reader: if you answered "no," please tell me, how can we -- you and I together -- make the Student Assembly matter to you? And then I would ask you to help me accomplish that goal. The first step is to have an open mind. If the answer to that question was "no" in your mind, don't think that it always has to be, please. Be open to change, allow it, encourage it. And help it.
I want the Assembly to matter in the lives of students. I want students to feel comfortable approaching their friends who are members, or me, with issues of importance to them. I want students to come speak to the Assembly during the period we should devote to "Community Time" at the beginning of every meeting. I want students to think that the Assembly is always actively seeking your thoughts, your opinions, your perspectives. Over the past two weeks, I have come to terms with the fact that I know fewer people than I thought. The ideas with which I have been confronted while going door-to-door have illuminated my understanding that there are silent observers who deserve just as much of a voice through the Assembly as the loud whiners like me. So the challenge with which I have presented myself is that of being the responsible democratic leader: to represent interests of people I do not know, people with whom I have not spoken, people who may never even express their thoughts openly.
Just because I am not an Asian-American woman or a Native-American man or an African-American lesbian does not imply that I am unable to seek those individual voices and represent them to the best of my ability. Obviously, I cannot deny what I am, but my active pursuit of additional information says more about who I am and who I think I need to be. After all, we cannot forget that we are talking about a college: we are all students with student needs, student desires and student aspirations. Those ties are the ones which bind us together, which transcend the differences inherent in a community that boasts diversity of background, perspective and ideology.
Responsible democratic leadership seems fairly simple. It is. It's just a matter of finding someone dedicated to the concept, someone committed to serving the interests of others before himself, someone devoted to knowing the varied, interesting perspectives which are so prevalent on this campus. Just this week, I told two prospectives from my high school that the best part of Dartmouth is the people; everyone is brilliant, but they also have at least one other area in which they are a star.
Because of these many talents surrounding us, being a responsible leader becomes a bit challenging. With so many outstanding students of such an array of backgrounds, people's interests are scattered. It is difficult to synthesize a single "student voice." But the responsible leader knows this limitation. She or he therefore attempts to represent the infinite supply of "student voices." As Student Assembly President, I hope, and plan, to be able to acknowledge the diversity of perspective because I will always be out there, always asking questions of a different person and on different subjects, so that I can make educated statements reflecting those many student voices around me.
That is how I think the Assembly can matter more. But it needs all of our help. You, me, your roommate, her boyfriend, his fraternity brother, your blitz buddy. We need to be open to the impact that the Assembly can make, open to the chance that it may be able to make a difference in our lives and those Dartmouth students after us. We need a collection of students ready and eager to be responsible democratic leaders, recognizing the many student voices on this campus and attempting to represent not one contrived student voice, but all of them.
