I spend most of my days in the same sweater, reading the College Voice archives. I relish seeing the font size shrink, the article lengths grow and the ever-changing masthead. I was revisiting the papers of my sophomore year when I reread former EIC Lilah Raptopoulos’ opinion article “SW6385: Dover White,” the color of her room. She wrote about the student-administration dyad that permeates almost every complaint about our institution: students solicit change that the school cannot always provide, yet the administration doesn’t always readily present explanations of their decisions. Conscious of this, Lilah suggested a stronger sense of communication between students and both sectors of management—the student-led (SGA) and the college-led—in order to sustain a real dialogue.
This inspired a letter to the editor from Corey Testa ’10, then J-Board Chair and a member of the SGA executive board, who countered that both administrative bodies actively provide students with information about their inner workings, through venues like emails from College Relations and SGA On the Can, but students choose to ignore them, thus remaining uninformed. The next week, Opinions Editor Alfred Degemmis ’10 responded to Corey’s letter, averring that Lilah’s point was not to attack SGA in the least: she was encouraging students to educate themselves before making an informed complaint, and to do it constructively. Alfred implored all branches of Conn’s leadership—not just SGA and the Voice—to work in tandem, to take the combative comments and mold them into something that will incite a collaborative change.
Photo by Julie McMahon
Last spring, Jamison Hermann ’11 told me it was the first time in his memory there wasn’t an editor of the paper in the SGA assembly. While news editor my junior year, I was also on the SGA executive board for the fall semester. Nate Cornell ’11, then the SGA president, told me at the beginning of my term that some of the other executive board members were worried I’d joined solely to infiltrate the executive board and report back to the Voice. I joined, however, because I wanted to learn exactly what SGA did—my knowledge garnered from being a house senator and quick conversations with members of the executive board didn’t cut it. Wasn’t I fulfilling my student responsibility?
This year, my interaction with SGA has been limited. I had lunch with Ted Fisher ’12, SGA Vice President, and Alicia Cauteruccio ’12, Chair of Honor Council, which, while it provided me with a greater insight into what SGA was discussing and doing, only happened once. Later, I met with Dorian Ehrlich ’13, the Chair of Communications, and we had a conversation so riddled with SGA jargon that I doubt I would have understood if I hadn’t been on SGA in the past.
Last Monday, SGA President Diane Essis ’12 and I had lunch at the Coast Guard Academy. Separated from the rest of the visiting group, we entered the room last. Diane and I sat with a few cadets, discussing significant matters—like if there is a similar stigma against Conn students at the Coast Guard—as well as smaller differences in our day-to-day existence. Elizabeth Tatum, our host, was fascinated about our availability of apartment-style living; Diane and I were impressed that “sleeping-in” constitutes an 8 AM alarm.
Both Diane and I simultaneously came to the same conclusion: the students of both institutions needed to work towards building a better relationship, and that any strife between the two schools is baseless and counterproductive. We turned to an easy alternative from the current norm: get students together in productive, intellectual, entertaining environments to create harmony that will stick around into early Sunday mornings. I offered an email compilation of weekly campus events to forward to the cadets; Diane suggested that the Student Activities Council create events specifically to attract Coast Guard attendance. We left the Academy feeling optimistic and productive, though vaguely hungry.
Our conversation showed that both SGA and the Voice have a lot in common: we are both active, student-led organizations with a desire to learn more about our college and change it for the better. Both organizations require time, effort and critical thinking; both are representatives of student opinion and desire. Yet any possible interaction has been stifled because of inactivity, both on behalf of the Voice and SGA, and an inherent assumption that the two need to be at odds. Though the aforementioned SGA-Voice interaction was less than pleasant, their opinions were variations on a single theme: students need to be better represented and informed.
The conversation between Lilah, Alfred and Corey demonstrated that there needs to be a constructive dialogue between the Voice and SGA. Let’s actually have one. This is our second issue in which we’ve run an SGA blurb in our News section, which students can read to be kept up to date on the previous week’s SGA meeting. I’m disappointed, however, that our interaction is thus far limited to a single column on page five. So SGA, I encourage you: come to our meetings to find out what we’re all about. Bring article ideas or cookies. Stop by during production, or shoot a writer an email about your thoughts on an article. I promise to recruit my staff to further an issue raised in an article by bringing it to a meeting or sit down with you for a meal. Let’s work harder at combining our forces to achieve our similar goal.
– Jazmine
