On Monday my esteemed editors, Eric Schmidt and Sean Kittridge, penned an editorial (“SSFC elections? You owe it to yourself to care,” Oct. 19) — the latest effort in the seemingly eternal, uphill battle of attempting to get students to care about their student government. While I admire their effort, they are fighting a losing battle. Of all the cogs of ASM that students could attempt to learn or care about, the Student Services Finance Committee is the most difficult to understand and very likely the least interesting.
Of course this is not to say the decisions made by SSFC are unimportant. Schmidt and Kittridge certainly acknowledged this when they said, “We wonder if the handful of candidates for SSFC — many of them freshmen — know about Southworth and recognize the magnitude of what they’re running for.”
Yet if Schmidt and Kittridge 1) recognize the decisions made by SSFC are vitally important and 2) don’t feel confident enough to even trust the candidates themselves to understand this, I would ask them why the hell they want students voting on something like this in the first place. Does trusting the average student, whose knowledge of SSFC is confined to guesses about what the acronym stands for, really sound like a good way to make decisions about who is qualified to oversee the spending of our segregated fees?
If we can only count on a single digit percentage of students to care enough to even cast a ballot, can we really count on them to research the candidates and committee for which they are voting ahead of time? While I would love to share in my editors’ optimism, the overwhelming call of reality is just too great in this situation.
The alternative to direct election by students would be the current methods for selecting the other non-Student Council members of the SSFC — annual appointments by Student Council. While it is correct the average Student Council member probably has not much more knowledge of SSFC than the average student does, Student Council members would at least have two distinct advantages in selecting students for SSFC positions: they get to interview them and hear from those Student Council members that do have SSFC knowledge.
It’s not that I have great trust in the Student Council’s knowledge of SSFC. After all, members are elected by the general student population. And those interested in Student Council are usually so low in number that an application for an appointment is usually sufficient for getting appointed.
However, there will always be enough members of Student Council who do have SSFC knowledge to help guide those that don’t into making well-informed decisions. Furthermore, the advantage of meeting and interviewing candidates — rather than just reading the three sentences about them in the online candidate matrix — would make choosing the most qualified candidate much easier.
It might seem that my proposal to have less directly-elected student government positions and more appointments is in fairly stark opposition to the premise of keeping segregated fees in control of students — an expression of the democracy and progressivism that students on our campus are so well-known for advocating. The answer to these concerns was answered unintentionally long ago by Thomas Jefferson: “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”
As sad as it may seem, students right now are just not informed enough to be trusted with choosing the members of SSFC. In an ideal world, all students would care enough to become adequately informed to decide these types of things. But unfortunately, we live in the real world, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
Patrick McEwen ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in nuclear engineering.
