College is supposedly a place of learning. In the psychological sense, learning implies behavioral and cognitive modification, often as the result of experience and conditioning.
Learning, in its simplest form, is not a particularly difficult thing. We do it every hour of every day. We are hardly special in this regard. Lab animals learn to run mazes, push buttons and pull levers to get a pellet or avoid a shock.
Dartmouth's Student Assembly, on the other hand, seems to get lost in the maze with startling regularity. Take, for example, the entirely predictable fate of the Big Green Bike program ("SA project failure seen in absence of public bikes," April 11). After wasting $2,000 on poorly-built communal bikes that the campus neither demanded nor cared about, after completely neglecting the program and responding to chronic theft and vandalism with little more than shrugged shoulders, the Assembly has finally abandoned the bikes. If this were an isolated incident, it would be understandable. Everyone makes mistakes. The trick is to learn from them.
But this BGB program was hardly the first learning opportunity that the Assembly had. After all, the bike program was initially tried in 2000, albeit on a smaller scale. The result? Campus apathy. Stolen, vandalized bikes. Complete failure. The human equivalent of the electric shock a lab rat gets for pulling the wrong lever.
So what did the Assembly do? It pulled the lever again, trying another bike program in 2004. The result? Campus apathy. Stolen, vandalized bikes. Complete failure. (Sound familiar?) Think of it as another shock -- zap.
Of course, there was only one reasonable course of action: The Assembly pulled the lever again. On the interesting theory that ramping-up the program and wasting more money than ever might somehow produce different results, the Assembly re-launched the BGB last year. Result? Entirely predictable: Zap, zap, zap. Even a lab rat would be pointing and laughing by now.
The Big Green Bikes may finally be gone, but the sadder news is that it's unclear just how much -- if any -- learning this debacle has prompted within the Assembly. If the comments of the program's supporters in The Dartmouth are any clue, we can all look forward to more debacles in the future.
One Assembly member pointed to the success of similar programs at other colleges like Middlebury, stating that despite his disappointment, he did not believe the project to be a failure. "It is something that has worked at a lot of colleges and communities across the world, but it would have been great if it had gone better," he said.
OK, let me see if I get this. The program failed miserably, but was not a "failure" because other colleges that have tried it managed to not screw it up royally? Pardon me while I scratch my head for a moment. Just because bike programs have worked elsewhere does not mean Dartmouth needs one on a campus where snow makes biking impossible for a good part of the year and all buildings are within walking distance anyway. But it was another Assembly member who offered my favorite defense: He pointed out that the "[BGB] only spent $2,000 of last year's Assembly's approximately $80,000 budget. The Assembly has more money than it knows what to do with," he said. "Consequently, it ends up wasting money on events like Collis-Up-All-Night. The Assembly allocates money for food and events like Collis-Up-All-Night and the student-faculty brunch simply because the money has nowhere else to go."
Wow. Now that's a new excuse. OK, so we screwed up, but at least we wasted less money than we usually do. I'm trying to feel comforted by this fact, but it's just not working.
Debacles like this -- and the amazingly cavalier attitudes that seem to accompany them -- explain why this campus's feelings on the Assembly range from total apathy to sheer contempt. When Dartmouth students confront serious issues like over-subscribed classes, vanishing academic departments, fleeing professors and tuition hikes, how can they be expected to pay any attention -- much less show respect -- to a student government that busies itself with unwanted bikes, debating the place of God in convocation speeches and investigating who leaked news of stealth BlitzMail terminals or put up an extra poster during the last meaningless election.
I have a radical idea. Instead of throwing money away on bikes, Collis-Up-All-Night and [insert-your-favorite-Assembly-disaster-here] simply because the Assembly is (A) incompetent and (B) "has more money that it knows what to do with," let's give that money to someone who could use it well. For example, the College could give full tuition to a deserving student from the Assembly's budget and still leave the assembly with $40,000 to waste.
Sure, it might be hard at first for the Assembly to adjust to having so much less money to misuse. But this is one bit of learning that I'm confident the Assembly could achieve.
