In order to achieve any campus-wide goals, Student Body President-elect Travis Green must first fix the fatally flawed infrastructure of Student Assembly, which will require that he cede his power over the formation of the Assembly's Executive Committee.
The charge of the Executive Committee includes setting the Assembly's year-long agenda and the agenda for the weekly general meetings. Currently, the Executive Committee is constituted primarily of eight vice presidents who chair committees like diversity and academic affairs, having risen to office through nomination by the president and approval by the General Assembly. Each of those vice presidents can be removed from their position by the recommendation of the president and a two-thirds vote of the Executive Committee. This means that, even if the president wants to remove one of his nominees, he and his remaining nominees account for enough votes to pull it off on their own.
Green should work to amend the Assembly's constitution so as to remove the vice presidents from the Executive Committee and instead fill it with at-large members elected by the General Assembly. The constitution should also be amended so that members of the Executive Committee can be removed by the General Assembly, not by the Executive Committee.
The president should retain the right to nominate whomever he wants to chair the Assembly's various standing committees. Those roles in a sense constitute the president's cabinet in that they carry out the agenda of the president in specialized areas. But that president-nominated cabinet should not be deciding what the General Assembly discusses nor what the Assembly does over the course of the year. That responsibility should belong to the body as a whole.
The Assembly currently allows for only two Executive Committee positions to be held by those not hand-picked by the president: treasurer and secretary. The status quo allows the president to push his own agenda under the guise of appointing capable and efficient leaders. Only a system in which the General Assembly elects Executive Committee members at large would avoid this source of internal presidential back-patting.
The job of Student Body President is not merely to ensure the success of his own administration -- it is also to improve the Assembly for future Dartmouth students. Under this system, the Executive Committee will support the president if his goals are in line with those of the Assembly, but will also serve as a check on the president if his goals diverge from those of his constituents.
This particular reform represents a substantive change and Green should push for it as soon as he takes office. He can make his mark as president and simultaneously take the first step toward restoring the Assembly's credibility.
