SGA elections. I like to think of them as Prom Queen elections. How Much Beer You Bought People Over The Last Semester elections. Best With Photoshop elections. Would-be Best Salesman In a Perfectly Competitive Market elections.
It wasn’t always like this. First semester elections happened back in the days of the bliss of ignorance. I was excited about shared governance. Excited! But soon I took a bite and tasted the bogey.
I remember promotional posters covering the bathroom mirror. Inside the stalls. On wet floors. Raunchy smiles and jovial hashtags filling my vision in every direction, face after face after face as I stood there with toothpaste in my mouth. Posters of people in mid-jump without their pants on. People holding a telephone and saying “I’M LISTENING TO YOU, CLASS OF 2017!” People with thumbs ups or peace signs and plain ol’ close ups for people with attractive smiles.
I waited patiently for the real election promotion to begin. I didn’t realize at the time that at Connecticut College, this was it.
Speech night was a thin strand of hope that quickly faded into the horizon of silliness. All anyone was trying to do was sound confident and make the crowd chuckle a few times. No one had an “agenda” because no one had any clue what they could “fight for.” At a rich, upper tier school in Connecticut, there are only so many things that are wrong enough to make people passionate about them, and no one really knew what to say other than “accountability,” “together we will…” and “I’M LISTENING.”
But they could have been reciting The Iliad in Greek for all the difference the content made. The people who had managed to socially blossom in the first few weeks of our freshman year got all the applause and screams their hearts could desire. At a time when literally no one was more qualified for anything than anyone else, no one had any sort of vision and no one cared. “Elections” happened and the social-butterflies with the least annoying posters and most catchy campaign slogans won. (The ones from the bathroom mirror didn’t make it.)
I was scandalized. This was the shared governance Conn advertised so loudly? How did these people decide that the person with his pants off was better than the person with the alliteration in his slogan? Was there a secret I was missing? Was it an American thing?
What I didn’t realize back then was: it didn’t matter who was better.
SGA elections, my friend Scott recently explained to me, are a role playing game. I had been talking very seriously about how SGA positions should be given to the winner of Camel Bingo, or better yet, split by lottery. Nothing differentiated any candidate from another, (in a perfect competition, all the goods are the same good) so we could save time and money by just chucking the facade. “But you’re missing the point,” Scott said with a grin. “It’s fun to do it this way! To dress up and make posters. It’s still random like a lottery, only funner. Like an elaborate, resume improving role playing game!”
The 2014-2015 academic year SGA elections which took place this last week began playing out immediately after the distressing warning email. Candidates began to make their appearances on posters, this time variously on a boat, with a bowtie, with a “sexy librarian” theme and completely in the nude clutching a fishbowl for dignity. (Of course what I need in SGA president is the ability to cover his privates effectively with household items in any and all situations. I would never vote for someone who couldn’t do that.)
Facebook pages began popping up. Friends began polarizing. The only difference was that this time, I saw the entire college and not just lost freshmen taking part in the madness. This wasn’t a one time hazing ritual or recruitment for a silly club, but the actual way the student body in power was selected at this place.
“I don’t think SGA focuses on the most popular people for the positions. Anyone can run and I’ve witnessed many conversations in SGA over the years where the body has worked hard so that positions have multiple candidates,” opined Sarah Cardwell, Associate Dean of Student Life. But how did candidates do anything to make sure that popularity wasn’t the sole sorting factor? Even SGA minutes from 2009 record proof that this reasoning isn’t right: “But all elections are essentially popularity contests.”
“The current election process, by including an opportunity for candidates to give speeches and articulate these things, provides students with some insight into who the person is,” Dean Cardwell further explained.
I was at speech night and some groundbreaking things happened: the use of the words “passionate” and “promise” with record-shattering frequency, the irony of candidates for “Diversity and Equity” talking about why people of color are acceptable because there is research that proves that their presence benefits the other students, the use of claims that skills learned from “attending and studying the workings of music festivals across the US” would be helpful as SAC Chair, etc. But I got little insight into who these people were.
However, I did learn that candidates’ agendas were to “innovatively increase the number of diverse students” at Conn (whatever that means), “facilitate real conversations in the community” and “represent” particular groups better than any competitor of theirs could. Shatrunjay Mall ’17 later told me, “I listened to the first few, but then I went on Twitter. I like knowing what is going on in the world better than listening to bad rhetoric.”
Mall’s disillusionment spoke again of the perfect competition I had come to expect. Same product, different sellers. The complete absence of a platform seemed to plague the broader positions, but even in specific ones like Chair of Residential Affairs or SAC where people had managed to find concrete issues to latch onto, there were only slivers of a real election manifesto, usually things students working independently with SGA could set into motion. Nothing made any given candidate irreplaceable.
But one can’t blame the candidates, they’re just ‘playing’ along. “The responsibility to be informed and vote for the person they feel is best qualified for the position lies with the students,” Dean Cardwell stressed. Student participation and interest in SGA is abysmally low relative to this expectation. Post speech night I met a freshman in the Larrabee common room who told me, “I don’t even know what is going on. I don’t know anyone who is running.” When I asked her why knowing someone was important, she said “It’s not like they have a platform or anything. I usually vote for my friends.” Another sophomore jokingly added, “Or whoever bribes me best”.
Past experience and credentials mean very little to the average student who doesn’t know a) what any past SGA position actually entailed and b) what experience would make someone the best person for the current job. This is how it comes down to eye grabbing poster.
One can see clearly that students don’t care and elections are a joke because the system is broken at both ends, and my rudimentary knowledge of economics tells me that perfect competition is intolerant of change. The administration says, “anything students can do to get students involved in the elections is a good thing for the process and for SGA,” but I think the problem is infinitely more structural than this.
Namely, why does SGA need elections?
These are tough questions to think about, considering the intense pressure to democratize every activity (and make it about power and hierarchy) that I’ve witnessed even in my short stay in America. But sometimes, what matters is that the job is done, not who does it. The least that can happen is a dialogue can begin now about the vacancy and idiocy of this practice. There are many role-playing games more fun and less wasteful than SGA elections.•
