With another SA election season come and gone, I see you all were about as excited as I was. A whopping 2,198 of us bothered to vote at all, barely more than half the student body. New SA president Dean Krishna was swept into office with an impressive mandate of 727 votes, not even twenty percent of the undergraduate population.
Why the lack of interest in the Dartmouth College SA electoral process? It's not as if voting in the election was that huge an amount of effort. I can understand not voting in real world elections if you have to drive all the way to the polls and such, but we really have no such excuse here. All you had to do was interrupt that session at latinplum-phumpers.com for like thirty seconds to jump over to the voting web site.
So why the apathy? My opinion: no one cares because there really aren't a whole lot of issues around here of pressing importance. Those few issues that are important, meanwhile, are carefully placed beyond the control of elected student representatives. No offense but personally I care much less about how many blitz computers are in Collis than about how much tuition is due to increase next year.
First, about the lack of many issues of true importance around here: let's admit it, people, we really have very little to worry about in the cosmic sense. Sure, we might have to knock off that paper before the 10A starts or quickly absorb some knowledge for that midterm, but after we finish, odds are that we can stroll back to our dorm to go to sleep and no one will shoot us on the way. We never have to worry about having enough to eat. We never even consider that mortar shells from the surrounding hills might, at any time, take out the River Cluster (well, some of us might, but only in the fanciful sense). We have so little of true importance with which to concern ourselves that we have leftover concern for places that really do have problems, like Kosovo. It's understandable, then, that there is little interest in student government when the issues around here that need to be tackled are of such worldly magnitude as whether Kiewit sorts papers immediately or on the half hour
.
The local issues that do matter, meanwhile, are far beyond the power of student resolutions and committee reports. As cute as that little resolution in support of the Greek system was, I am sure that caused a big stir up in Parkhurst.
"Sir, the assembly has thrown down the gauntlet. We have word of a resolution in support of the Greek system."
"A resolution? Jesus, call the architect and have them call off the attack squadron of F-16s. Good thing we caught word in time; the napalm strafing run on Webster Avenue was due to begin at 0600."
To wit, I don't see the SA-administration relationship as one among equals, nor even of a father-son type of respect. Actually, I would characterize it as more like owner-Golden Retriever. That is, you might take the SA outside when it suggested it, but only because you knew that if you didn't, it would poop on the floor.
Wait, that got a little off track. At any rate, the SA certainly does not enjoy a healthy power dynamic with the administration. This, I think, is easy to understand. Money is power around here, and the college certainly has a lot more of both. Dartmouth disburses some $300 million per year, or ten thousand times more than it gives to SA. While SA is funded by part of your student activity fee, ostensibly separate from the general monetary pot, that fee, it should be noted, is billed and collected by the college. Any notion of a student voice, I feel, is just that: a voice and little more, since $30,000 a year does not back up a whole lot of policy.
Interesting sidenote: if you divide the $30,000 per year by 4300 undergraduates, it works out to about $7.00 each. Perhaps it is a sign of greater order in the cosmos, or perhaps just mere coincidence, but that $7.00 would just about cover one order of EBAs breadsticks for every Dartmouth student. If, in addition to the leadership choices, an item on next year's SA election ballot were a referendum on whether to have an SA or to have breadsticks, I bet a lot more than 2198 people would bother to vote. My address is 303 Hitchcock if anyone would like to bring those breadsticks up ...
Please don't take any of this as a slam on the people who spend so much time and effort running SA. It's not that I don't respect their efforts to better their college, it's just that I don't think all of their hard work amounts to very much. Given the administration-SA power dynamic, I don't see SA ever being allowed to decide anything of true importance, and with the plethora of vital issues left to the decision of our student representatives, I can understand why no one bothers to vote. I myself may surf over to the web site next year, but only if the breadsticks are on the line.
