Student Government election results are out. Now I am excited to see that my write-in campaign for SOC Secretary was successful, even though AU’s Student Activities messed up by attributing my write-in votes under SOC Vice President and refuses to correct the officially-published results. But whatever, I’ll save the subject of how grossly incompetent Student Activities is for another day.
But I would like to set aside my personal victory in the ever-so-competitive race that is SOC Secretary (end sarcasm here) and share some of my thoughts on these election results at large.
A month or two ago, the AWOL magazine made a bit of hay with a cover story on the “male-dominated” Student Government. They made the point that a majority of the members of the Student Government are male, even though female students outnumber male students two to one at AU. Of course, the response from SG members was that a majority of the appointed (read: unelected) positions in the SG are filled by women, and as for the Undergraduate Senate, more women have been appointed to fill vacant seats as men have dropped out. But today’s election results show yet again that the fault for this is simply that AU students don’t care about their Student Government.
Now, I mean absolutely no disrespect for Tim McBride with this blog post. He is indeed a very capable and proactive member of the Student Government and I do believe that he will be an outstanding SG president. But like most of the presidents before him, he doesn’t have much of a mandate. Only 1800 students voted, which is only about 30% of the student body. And of those votes, Tim won with only 36% of the vote, not counting a small handful of abstentions.
The field for President was very crowded this year: six candidates ran, and of them, four had never held an SG position. (I’m pretty sure this is the first election in at least a couple of years where the field wasn’t exclusively comprised of SG incumbents.) Barely under half of the votes went to the SG incumbents, and barely over half of the votes went to the SG newbies. The runner-up slot went to Jessica Darmawan, the one woman to run, and someone whom I considered to be a very capable candidate with a lot of fresh ideas.
But even though Tim will make a great president, he nevertheless provides more fodder to those who consider the SG a “boys club,” as AWOL put it. He will be the fourth SG president in a row to be a junior, white male student in the SPA leadership program. He is the second in a row to have received the explicit endorsement of the incumbent SG president. But on these counts, I can’t blame Tim. I instead blame AU students for simply refusing to care who their Student Government officers–namely, their representatives to the AU administration–are. And while AWOL isn’t the first to rant about how male-dominated the SG is and utilize self-selected statistics to back themselves up, they’ve got to admit that AU students are the ones who are (or are not) making the choices.
But now let’s take this line of thought a little bit further. Why is it that 70% of AU students don’t bother to cast a vote at all? Why is it that whenever I encourage my friends and classmates to vote, most of them absolutely refuse, claiming that Student Government has no relevance to them? And even when I do convince them to vote, most of them end up writing in fake names in the Write-In boxes, rather than voting for actual candidates? Furthermore, why is it that so many SG positions wind up having nobody bothering to run for them at all?
This is, I believe, where the Student Government has failed. Now granted, this past academic year has marked a significant change for the SG in that they have finally started trying to make AU students not hate them. Whereas during my freshman year, the Student Government was comprised of four incompetent executives that faced internal power struggles and failed in a majority of the initiatives they tried, combined with an Undergraduate Senate more interested in grandstanding and finger-wagging than with actually representing the needs of students, this year’s SG has tried to turn the tide around. But they still have a long way to go.
The Undergraduate Senate is still completely ineffective at providing timely communication to students about what they’re actually doing, and most of the advocacy that they have done for the students has been passive and reactive. (Passing a resolution is just a piece of paper that states your opinion on something. It doesn’t mobilize the student government and means very little in the long-term). They’ve made some efforts at outreach this year, but those efforts have been half-hearted at best. Male-dominated or not, they do still feel like an exclusive club.
As for this year’s executives, they have been a big improvement over last year’s executives in that they have actually fulfilled their core responsibilities. But they haven’t done much that has been particularly groundbreaking. The most visible thing the SG has done has been Nate Bronstein’s fireside chats, which have admittedly been entertaining to watch. (Full disclosure: I actually helped edit two of them for ATV, last fall.) But while adopting a “superhero” theme may have helped reverse the negative connotation of the Student Government and turned Nate Bronstein into the biggest celebrity on campus since whoever got Ben Ladner fired, I would personally like to see some more substantial stuff coming from the SG in 2011-12.
I think that the Student Government still has not come to define itself as anything of value to AU students. And that’s incredibly disappointing, because the SG has the power to effect a lot of change on campus and do a tremendous amount of great things for AU students. But in my time at AU, I’ve never seen them use that power to anywhere near its full potential.
Then again, perhaps another reason why students don’t bother to vote is because the week-and-a-half of campaigning stops being about who is the best person for the job, and instead about who can make it to the election having committed the fewest superficial violations. While this spring was nothing compared to last year’s crap-fest, it still looked pretty ugly with candidates racing to report other candidates for having a sidewalk chalking a few inches too big, or for incumbent SG officers mentioning their title and an endorsement of a candidate at the same time. (That second one cost a candidate 18 hours of campaigning.) How can anyone care about SG elections when the entire election process feels like a big joke?
So here’s a couple of thoughts I have for the Student Government, after tonight’s elections:
#1 Instant Runoff Voting
I don’t like plurality voting. I don’t believe that you can claim a mandate when you only get 36% of the vote. I think that whenever there’s an office for which there can only be one winner, a majority (more than 50%) should be required to elect. But since it would be a major logistical challenge to hold a runoff election every time someone doesn’t get 50%, I think that the SG should institute the principle of instant runoff voting. The way this methodology works is that voters are asked to rank the candidates by their most-preferred choice to their least-preferred choice. Their most-preferred choice is of course the candidate whom they vote for. But if no candidate wins a majority, then everyone who voted for the least-popular candidate will then have their second-choice vote count. And the process of elimination keeps going until a candidate wins a majority. It’s like a runoff election without the logistics of having to set up a second election.
#2 Scrap the BOE Policy Book (again)
After last year’s fiasco, everyone wanted a complete rewrite of the seven-page election regulations. So a rewrite took place over the summer, resulting in a brand new “Board of Elections Policy Book” comprised of… sixteen pages. From my observations this spring, having more rules meant more confusion and more ways to interpret or misinterpret them. And thus, more ways for nitpicky candidates to exploit the technicalities of those rules to knock other candidates temporarily or permanently out of the running. Here’s a newsflash: we are all adults, and I think we can stand not having super-stringent rules for every single little pesky thing during each election cycle. Let’s make the campaigns about which candidate is the best candidate for the job again, okay?
#3 Make Class & School Councils Mean Something
Did you know that every graduating class at AU and all five schools have their own undergraduate council that is part of the Student Government? Well, if you’re in Kogod, then you merely pretend that your council has nothing to do with SG, even though it’s not true. But for everyone else, chances are that you have no idea what they do, if you even know that they exist. You’re not alone, even most of the people in the SG don’t generally know where class & school councils fit in the equation. As such, nine of the 36 class & school council offices this year had no winner at all, and most of the others were write-ins.
Now I don’t have the magic answer here (though I hope to come up with some ideas during my upcoming year as Secretary for the SOC Council), but I do think that the SG as a whole needs to take a hard look at class & school councils in the coming year and determine how to make them more relevant to the students they serve.
#4 Better Outreach — The Kind Where the SG Does the Reaching
The SG has taken a number of steps to improve their outreach this year, but I feel like most of their efforts have failed because they have relied on students coming to them. Nate’s fireside chats try to engage students by telling them to e-mail him or his cabinet members. The Undergraduate Senate institutes office hours to invite students to come to MGC 262. And the Judicial Board, well, remains as irrelevant to the overall student body as ever.
Of course, some individuals have attempted to do more of the going out to students type of outreach. A couple of senators briefly tried an outreach effort where they engaged students in their dorms, though this has yet to escape the confines of a “trial run.” Jessica Darmawan made a point of engaging students and listening to them as part of her campaign, which I found surprisingly refreshing. The SG needs to do more (and I mean, a LOT more) of this type of direct outreach to students in order to get them engaged. Sitting with an open e-mail inbox isn’t going to cut it.
#5 Take Real Action
AU students will get behind something if there is a massive effort. Just look at last January’s response to the picketers from the Westboro Baptist Church. The campus was instantly mobilized by a grassroots effort to offer a counter-response focused on love and acceptance. But the SG mainly reacted to that effort lightly, with yet another light-weight resolution passed by the Undergraduate Senate. And most of the other items that could have been converted into action this year from the SG were instead met with little concern beyond one of those resolutions. The SG’s temporary neutral stance on “WONK” became a year-long position, and the follow-up on student opinion about WONK that the Senate asked for never happened. Proposed changes to academic standards and schedule changes also got a fairly tacet response, and there really hasn’t been much of anything else that one can say that the SG really did to mobilize AU students. What can I say, it’s hard to be politically active when there’s nothing to be active about.
I don’t know what standards the Princeton Review (or whoever makes these determinations) uses to call AU the most politically active campus in the country. I believe that all politics is local, and if our SG election results are any indication, I would say that AU is more along the lines of most politically apathetic. Until AU students recognize the potential that the SG has to shape our experience at AU, the Student Government will indeed continue to function along the lines of an exclusive club.
But at least we’ll get to keep reading about it in those magazine articles.
