Vox discipulorum

My roommate gave me a blank stare when I asked her why the Student Assembly, Dartmouth's student government, is so ineffective. No words: just a blank stare. Another friend remarked, "People just don't take it seriously. It's just a holdover from high school, if you ask me." And I had asked him, as well as many of his fellow undergraduates. His answer could have come from almost anyone I spoke with.

The Student Assembly is relatively new. Its first members were elected in the fall of 1983. The previous governing body, the Undergraduate Council (UGC), which had been around for more than three decades, dissolved the spring before because of problems with representation. Members of the UGC had been elected at large by class. And according to many students, the elections had been nothing more than popularity contests; if you recognized a friend's name on the ballot, you circled it.

The Student Assembly was created to solve this problem. Most of its members are elected in the fall from housing constituencies such as clusters and fraternity houses. Eight members of the freshman class are also elected at large at this time. In addition, there are ten at-large members on the Assembly who are elected in late April along with the president and vice president. The intent of the plan is to shift Assembly representation from class to residential bodies.

This all sounds great on paper, but the Assembly unfortunately got off to a bad start last year. It tried to solve the College symbol crisis (no small matter), with the admirable intention of bringing some unity to campus. The Assembly recommended the adoption of the Timberwolf, subsequently discovering that it had very little campus-wide support. A noble failure, that. They also had attendance problems. Several times meetings were cancelled for lack of a quorum, and this was front page news in TheDartmouth every time it happened.

Tim Reynolds '85, Student Assembly president, has been working hard all year to establish the body's credibility. "Last year I saw the Assembly as just another student organization. It wasn't leading, as it should have been, and thus there was no way to channel the students' voices," Reynolds said. He and vice-president David Kramer '85 have developed a strong committee structure and some hard-line organization. The three standing committees, on Educational Policy, Undergraduate Affairs, and Administrative Affairs, are the real workhorses, according to Reynolds. Every elected member is required to sit on one of these committees.

Reynolds' theory of leadership is simple: Do things for the students; don't just claim to be their representative. "Student governments in the past have always said they spoke for students, but what did they do for them? We're going out and working with our own individual constituencies to help them get things accomplished," he said.

But the group has discovered it is difficult to shed an old image. "The image of the Student Assembly is what hurts it," one student told me. "But it's a vicious circle. The students who get involved aren't representative of the student body, so how can they hope to get anyone to listen to them? Because it's a group no one listens to, who wants to get involved?"

I think it goes a little deeper than that. Dartmouth's ten-week terms are quick and intense. The high academic drive of most students forces them to worry about the present. At the end of every term, since the advent of the D-plan, half the campus picks up and leaves for Washington, China, or somewhere in between. New faces fill in the empty slots trying to pick up where their classmates left off. The Student Assembly is in a precarious position. It tries to be a constant institution within a very transient student body.

"They never take a stand on real issues, like divestiture," said one student. "It seems like everything they deal with is trivial. Why don't they discuss something significant?" This student has a valid point. It's hard to get seniors and juniors to concern themselves with issues such as housing and meal plans that will never even affect them.

Laura Hicks '85, chairman of the Committee on Educational Policy, thinks the Assembly has at least made a step in the right direction. "The channels now exist for students to have their voices heard. I believed the Assembly is making an effort to be as representative as possible. I feel part of a government's job is to inform, and that's what we're doing our best at."

Hicks recognizes the students' apathetic attitudes. The difficulty in getting a majority opinion is that "an Assembly member will go back to his or her constituency, say a dorm cluster, and there will be no one at the cluster council meeting," she said. "Considering what we have to work with an extremely apathetic student body we're doing okay." She also noted that while Assembly meetings are open' to the entire campus, few non-members bother to attend. Does that mean no one cares? Not really.

The recent ROTC decision at the College is a classic example of the Assembly's identity problems. The Assembly made a nearly unanimous recommendation to President McLaughlin in favor of reinstituting ROTC. After the President's decision was announced, some 40 students appeared in his office to protest, bringing with them a petition with 467 signatures objecting to the return of ROTC. While they represent only 15 percent of the student body, that seems a substantial enough figure. When the President asked the group why they hadn't gone to the Student Assembly, they were incredulous: "Why would we go to them? They don't do anything."

"Students don't understand how to voice their concerns," said Reynolds. "Everyone needs to know where to plug into the system. All students need to understand that they can have an effect."

While awareness of the. Assembly is growing, the increase in effectiveness lags behind. This situation has created administrative concern, because, as President McLaughlin put it, "The College needs student input. It is ironic that a school training the leaders of tomorrow has students who don't get involved in student government leadership roles."

I hope, that, given time, the Student Assembly can become a strong organization. It does not do us, as students, justice, to have our own representation appear so vunerable and inconsistent. As my roommate admitted after our conversation, "I'm embarrassed. But it's no one's fault but our own."