To the Editor:
Frode Eilertsen's letter in the Oct. 16 Dartmouth ["Assembly's Summer Full of Accomplishments; Members Anything But 'Lazy'"] is very telling, though probably not in the way he intended: "This year's Student Assembly," he said, "has been extremely successful in organizing itself in a swift and efficient manner, already having a large and very active membership at work." He appears, from where I'm standing, to be absolutely right. In my three years at Dartmouth so far, the Student Assembly was always frightfully busy at something. The question that occurred to me as I read Eilertsen's letter was, "What exactly have they been busy doing?"
In my time here, I have been in large part completely ignorant of SA's activities, and admittedly the guilt would seem to lie in my total apathy with regard to the Student Assembly as an organization. But why am I so uninterested? Politics usually enthrall me, even at a local level. What makes the SA different from other political bodies?
The answer lies in its total irrelevance to my life. The Federal government had the power to last year to make it illegal for me to swear over BlitzMail, though this was struck down by the courts. The State of New Hampshire had the power to prevent me from drinking until I turned 21. Even the little town of Hanover had the power to make me pay money to license my dog. The SA's effect on my life is apparently limited to putting new computers in Collis, where I almost never go.
The list of "accomplishments" which Eilertsen presents in his letter is telling on this subject. College Kits and Mugshots are, respectively, free stuff I don't need and an expensive book I could conceivably use, but won't pay for. Cluster printing, whatever it is, won't affect me because I own a printer. Incidentally, I don't need DarTalk or cable in the dorms researched, since I wisely chose to move out of ORL housing. So much for SA improving the quality of my life.
The projects on "larger issues" are even less impressive. The promised "Sexual Harassment Brochure" will, I feel confident, prove to be completely useless, both because of the issue's hazy nature, and because the target audience (students who might be likely to commit sexual harassment) will almost certainly not read it. On a related note, I may not be a lawyer, but I feel confident that I have a pretty good understanding of my rights, and I certainly don't have any confidence in a "Student's Bill of Rights" put out by the SA.
Dartmouth Dining Services? Without question, this is an enormous collection of blunders which needs desperately to be overhauled, but the SA is absolutely impotent in any matter of substance, so any action it may take will be rendered ineffective by sheer lack of authority. Likewise, any attempt to meddle with administrative fines is doomed to failure for the same reasons. The College is not, as I have said before, a democracy, and as such is not generally responsive to pressure from the SA, or any other "student organization," except by administrative whim. Anyone remember the "Save Webster Hall" campaign?
Eilertsen closes his article with the following: "These are all major accomplishments for students and by students who can be...called anything but lazy." I would suggest their status as "accomplishments" is in question, and they can be called anything but "major." The SA is not lazy; they are a hard-working group. They are, like Sisyphus, laboring at never-ending tasks. The trouble is, none of those tasks is worth doing.
