I will take a pause from my usual philosophic speculations to address a local issue. In the recent weeks, there has been popular discontent with our favorite organization in the milieu of bureaucracy here at the College: the Council on Student Organizations.
This body has perhaps one of the hardest jobs on campus: dispersing student funds to a motley group of organizations. COSO goes through a rigorous selection process to find individuals who are "open-minded" and has to fund all kinds of groups from the cultural to the academic.
I do not envy any of the students that sit on COSO, nor do I envy Linda Kennedy, who somehow manages to stay sane through it all. With their job in mind, I would like to turn a journalist's eye on COSO.
Recently, there have been two very interesting cases of dissatisfaction with COSO's decisions: the Dartmouth Rainbow Alliance/Gay-Straight Alliance and the still-unrecognized Southern Society. Both of the groups claim that they exist in a perpetual state of "otherness."
The Southern Society alleges that it will address the dearth of Southern-related courses and educate us about Southern culture, after performing perhaps the greatest feat of all; finding Southern culture. Although recently denied funding for "moving in too many directions at once," the Southern Society said this will not stop them.
Unlike the Southern Society (I think of plantation poker parties whenever I here that name), the LGBTQ are established organizations for a legitimate minority, despite its ever-growing acronym.
For the last few years, COSO has generously funded a DRA/GSA trip to Montreal for Pride. Members of the groups say that Pride is important because it gives them a rare chance to be in a community where they form the majority. It is educational because it helps them to learn about themselves.
They were mystified this year to find that they were not going to receive funding for Pride (apparently due to a "policy change" from the winter term).
While the two situations on the surface appear to be the same, there is actually a stark contrast. For the Southern Society, a lack of recognition is the correct policy; COSO did its job well.
Real organizations, which are established, like the Jacko or the DRA, are deprived of scarce resources (money) when ephemeral three-term organizations ooze in and out of existence and, in the meantime, steal funds from the established and longevous.
The LGBTQ organizations are a different story. The board of judges that make up the COSO collective, though they be fellow students, inadvertently question the legitimacy of the organizations they interrogate when funding is requested.
Nor does this appear to be an isolated event; many students despise COSO after being before the board and those who consider themselves oppressed by power structures and cultural discourses here at the College, whether real or imagined, feel demeaned by the entire COSO process.
Mrs. Kennedy believes that COSO is apolitical; the organization must realize that every act they take is inherently politicized in the context of identity politics that have come to permeate even the very foods that we eat.
The interrogators must learn, when dealing with longstanding organizations, to inquire about the merits of the project without asking the established entities to justify their existence.
The zealousness of some of the finance ministers who compose the body, though well-intention, can turn a simple report on the merits of a project into a Spanish Inquisition over a body of funds that are controlled by Leninist-like selected body of students.
To be fair to COSO, there was a policy shift in January that affected the LGBTQ interns, but in the context of the grueling academic day and the already draining commitment of planning an event, most organizers are unaware of the closed-door "policy shifts" that bureaucracies often like to make. Why are so many uninformed of new policies and come away so dissatisfied? Whose interests does COSO represent?
The body that controls the funds, by definition, has power over many and various competing interests. Luckily for us, COSO made the right decision regarding the Southern Society. It must be remember, however, that some groups experience a life of oppression, some of which may be real and some of which may be imagined, and when they appear before the financial judiciary, the last thing they need is to justify their existence to a monetary power structure.
