With Student Assembly elections days away, it is important for both the candidates and student body alike to recognize the relative capacity in which the Assembly can effectively operate and the extent to which it can exact change.
As in years past, much of the rhetoric surrounding this year's campaigns focuses on issues that are too large and complicated for the Student Assembly to resolve and goals that are too lofty to accomplish. As the most effective line of communication between the student body and the administration, the Assembly serves a definite purpose on this campus. Yet all too often this purpose is sullied with pipe dreams that waste valuable time and resources.
This is not a call for cynicism, but for pragmatism. The Assembly should strive for modest progress in areas it can actually affect -- the little things that make students happier and more comfortable day in and day out.
To some degree, the Assembly is disadvantaged at the outset. It lacks the funding and oversight necessary to achieve the sublime ambitions it imposes on itself. And like many other student organizations at the College, it is plagued by a lack of continuity in its membership and meager involvement from upperclassmen. At a school where change moves at a snail's pace on the backs of ubiquitous administration-sponsored ad-hoc committees, an Assembly president who is in office for less than a year cannot expect to change the (Dartmouth) world. While high-reaching promises might help a candidate get elected to office, they undermine the efficacy and legitimacy of the Assembly in the long run.
The Assembly president cannot and should not be expected to effect large-scale changes such as increasing the dining hall capacity, improving campus gender dynamics or any other sweeping changes to College culture. What the president can do, however, is work on improving the small number of services provided by the Assembly on which students actually rely, such as course review guides, spring break buses to New York City and the Collegiate Readership program. While this year's campaign has included ideas from both candidates on how to improve upon these and other services, there has still been too much talk of the unattainable.
But at the same time, those individuals who scoff at the sincere efforts of Assembly members are equally misguided. While their sentiments stem from frustration with the often unproductive nature in which the Assembly operates, it ultimately exists to represent them and they should focus their energies on reform, not criticism.
Once candidates and the student body at large can come to grips with the realization that the role of Assembly president is not a glamorous but an administrative one, the campus and the Assembly itself will be much better off. Few would argue that the Assembly doesn't work hard for Dartmouth students; let's make sure that energy is aimed in the right direction.
