Less Facebook, More Face Time

Five of our fellow students meet with dining services regularly, and tell them whether to put less mayonnaise in the tuna fish at Smith. Two get to suggest which and how many classes should be in a given major. Three have voting power on the one hundred million dollars allocated to our college each year. The 37 members of SGA brought us keycards, Arabic, and the New York Times. Fundamentally every change that’s made to the college, be it to our email interface, our athletic logo, or our financial aid budget, is brought through these students to critique and approve. The 27 SAC members have a gigantic budget for our social events, which includes over $30,000 for Floralia and $15K solely for co-sponsoring other student-initiated and run events.

This means that if the Voice wanted to cover the 1941 room’s walls with unread copies of the Times, hire newsboys to serve alphabet soup, play “The Small Print” by Muse on repeat, and throw PressFest the Dance, SAC would let us, and help us pay for it.

Who knew our students had that kind of power? Until I began digging headfirst through the website and poking my floormates with questions, I certainly didn’t. SAC and SGA are two powerful organizations with the capacity to generate valuable change on campus. Students, however, are unsatisfied and uninformed because their representatives don’t effectively seek out the input of the student body for whom they speak.

Our SGA members sit through endless hours of meetings to make decisions, and our SAC members, lest we forget, are the ones cleaning the streamers off the walls, the chips out of the carpets, and the lost underpants out from the corners of our dances. This is not to devalue the work they do; the executive boards may have their own inefficiencies, but their commitment is strong. Even so, according to the documented minutes from the twelve times SGA met last semester, an estimated 30 total hours of discussion, house senators said the words my house or my dorm seven times. Five were in reference to the dorm’s house council, a meeting that is still a poor sampling of a house’s residents. One was in reference to a senator’s plan to email his house for suggestions. And just one senator, Katie Moldune, asserted the input of her dorm, saying simply on November 5, “I brought this back to my dorm and a lot of people see [more bandwidth] as a priority.”

“SGA senator” and “SAC rep” are just flippy, fun nicknames for a real role; these students are representatives. A representative is a leader that reaches out to their community in order to best advocate for them. Their job is to ascertain what the majority of their constituents want based on what the situation at hand requires. As a student body, we have the power to resolve the problems we have with Connecticut College, so it’s important that we relay our gripes and accolades to these institutions. But the reality of the situation is that we will only start once we’re asked. An organization can’t expect contribution until its outside community understands, really understands, what it is and how it works. Our representatives have a huge responsibility: to ask. It is their job to actively solicit this input and relay it to the two most powerful student groups on campus. The goal is not to please everyone, but to fairly relay the general concerns of their house.

A representative can tell you to write to SAC@conncoll.edu, but SAC@conncoll.edu is a name with no face. An email can suggest you go to Open Forum, but standing up in front of 37 sheer stockinged, button-down shirted “leaders” to offer a few off-the-cuff thoughts about Freshman Orientation is simply too intimidating. Our associated modes of communication have been clogged – our Facebook events are flooded, flyers overlapped on bulletin boards, inboxes overwhelmed, Camelweb littered with links. Our generation’s overanalyzed dependency on social media and virtual interconnectedness has exhausted our systems of passive communication, but in doing so has opened the door to the forgotten world of physical contact. Want me to remember you? Come up, look me in the eye, and tell me what you do. Ask me what I want. You take that time out to care, I’ll take the time out to respond, and next time I have an idea, maybe I’ll actively solicit you.

Last Friday, I walked up to freshmen Morgan Grandi and Luciana Rivera as they ate Cro hoagies and asked them if they knew what SGA did. Morgan stuttered a bit. “Well, um, we learned about this during orientation. Let’s see. I like the Can. I guess, I guess I’m not sure. I think they do a pretty good job.”

It’s truly a shame that these girls haven’t been directly contacted by SAC or SGA since Orientation’s information overload, because when asked for input, they had valuable ideas. Morgan said there should be a stronger emphasis on cleanliness in the dorms. People shouldn’t think twice before picking up the beer cans they pass on the stairwell, she said. It’s just common courtesy. Luciana said her favorite dance was the Rave. Why? Because it was an event that pushed past the usual rap and hip hop, and allowed for dancing that was fast, loud, fun, and less intrusive.

These girls didn’t say, “Please tell the SGA Public Relations Chair to promote on the Can that…” or “Please let the Variety Events Committee know…” because they don’t know those institutions. If our representatives don’t reach out to students face to face, knock on their doors and ask them what sorts of dances they’ve liked at Conn, what questions they want to ask Campus Safety, what suggestions they have about the College’s environmental efforts, they are not doing their job. Simply put, Luciana and Morgan had valuable points of view, and now these clubs know. The weekly grindbox isn’t fun? Students do care about their living environments? Imagine all the other ideas out there.