President Wright is responsible for changing our campus' thoughts, opinions and actions regarding issues that affect our personal lives. To most of us, this statement sounds absolutely ludicrous. I don't know about you, but I don't want the Dartmouth administration telling me how to think, feel or act about a certain issue. Chris Bertrand, Student Assembly's summer president, however, does.
When approached about SA financially supporting this summer's Consent Day, Bertrand stated that such a program should be funded by the administration and not by our student government in order "to make sure our student activity fees go directly towards students in a way that the administration could not achieve on their own." Oh, well then that explains why Student Assembly just bought brand new BlitzMail computers and why I can request a wake-up call for my 10A. Obviously, the College just didn't have the money to buy computers or to hand out alarm clocks, so SA had to step in and save the day.
Consent Day was first held during the summer of 2003 in an effort to raise campus awareness regarding the prevalence of sexual abuse and ways that we as a college community can change this. In the past two years, almost every single Greek house has supported Consent Day with money, volunteers, food and entertainment, and just last year, SA contributed 25 percent of Consent Day's $5,000 budget. This year, though, the Assembly has decided "that students and parents shouldn't pay directly for really well-planned programs that the College can easily underwrite." Phew! Now I can call home and let my mom know that everything is okay; her money is going towards my neighbor's daily wake-up call and not being wasted on events that promote the betterment of our campus as a whole.
I must give Chris Bertrand some credit. He personally supports Consent Day as it "clearly benefits students' health." However, even this comment raises another concern for me. Is our Student Assembly president so uneducated about sexual abuse that he thinks it is merely an issue of health?
According to Amnesty International, one in three women will be the victim of sexual abuse or sexually-related violence in her lifetime. Given that statistic, I think it would be incredibly naive for any of us to believe that Dartmouth's campus is immune to sexual abuse and that that abuse is solely an issue of an individual's health.
Don't believe me? You can go look it up on a Student Assembly computer or you can come to Consent Day 2005.
