If you ask the average Dartmouth student what they think of the Student Assembly, you would probably hear something like:
"Who cares?"
"They don't do anything."
And most often: "It's a joke."
In the time I've worked on SA over the past two years I've learned two things: first, those feelings are somewhat justified. Second, they don't have to be.
The Student Assembly should be an organization that represents students and fights effectively for their opinions. If you elect me President, I will make sure it is one.
Currently the most obvious problem with the Assembly is that it is neither representative of, nor accountable to, the student body.
Becoming a voting member of the students' "representative body" is a matter of passing a petition around an Assembly meeting. Without speaking to a single person, without any students outside the meeting room knowing anything about it, you can become a "student representative." That needs to end now.
Any student who wishes to speak for students should actually be chosen by them. This seems obvious, but for a variety of reasons the Assembly has never behaved that way. I want to make sure that students get to choose their representatives and hold them accountable for their performance.
The other problem with the Assembly is that it tackles issues its members care about, not those students care about. Unfortunately these are rarely the same issues. As nice as they are, the A-lot shuttle and five-cent copies are not the pressing issues on which a student government should focus. Student services are certainly valuable, but they should not be SA's primary concern.
The Assembly needs to dedicate itself to the broader issues that truly impact the lives of students. Only the Assembly has the potential to draw all segments of campus into a discussion of those issues. There are three issues that I believe need the undivided attention of the Assembly:
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Diversity
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Gender Relations
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Student Choice.
Diversity and gender relations are issues that have not been adequately addressed in the past. The Trustees in their anti-climactic announcement, made a very feeble attempt at pretending they really care about them, then dropped it. That leaves the Assembly, as the only student group that can effectively deal with these issues on a campus-wide level.
I will not pretend to have the answers to these problems at Dartmouth. If the answers were easy they would have been found long before I showed up. All I know is that they must be comprehensively addressed, and they have not been up until now.
Student Choice, on the other hand, has been extensively discussed over the past year. Theoretically we heard some conclusions last week from the Trustees. In reality, aside from a few productive decisions about the Co-ed Fraternity Sorority system, a few terrible ones, and a few more that will have little effect on anything, the Board dropped the whole SLI right back in our laps. And that makes it all the more important that someone with a vision all students can get behind is in charge next year.
If I am elected I will work, both within the SA and with the administration, to ensure the following:
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The creation of significant number of additional social and residential options without the elimination of those currently available.
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That every student at Dartmouth is comfortable taking advantage of the options, both new and old, that are provided.
We need more and better residential facilities to be created, but without forbidding students to move off-campus or leave their clusters. We need more social alternatives outside the CFS system, but not at the price of the wholesale destruction of those options. And no matter how many choices students are free to make, if many feel uncomfortable making some of those choices we will not really have improved student life at Dartmouth.
These are the issues the Student Assembly must deal with, not just next year, but well into the future. If the Trustees did nothing else, they certainly made that clear. In order to deal with these issues credibly, the Assembly will require fundamental changes in both the way its membership is chosen, and in what it sees as its goals.
For any of this to come about, the next SA President will need the vision to see what the Assembly can be, and the experience to know how to get it there. I am the only candidate who has both those qualities, and I hope you will entrust me with this responsibility.
I'd like to give students a reason to stop joking about SA.
