Editorial, 3-5-19

This issue of The College Voice includes after-the-fact SGA and Honor Council election coverage.  In the future, the News section will be covering SGA, Honor Council, and elections more rigorously than ever before.

SGA should be an important deliberative legislative body for the students of Connecticut College. Honor Council should be the place where students receive a fair hearing with respect to any alleged violations of College policy.

SGA finds regular success in using financial resources to make positive changes on campus. SGA’s finance committee dishes out over $100,000 to student organizations each year; SGA sustainability chairs have often brought dozens of funding-based resolutions to the assembly floor. But representatives might feel as though much of the student body doesn’t care about what goes on in SGA. They are likely right. The latest email I received from my SGA representative featured six different font colors, two different font sizes, and asked if I wanted to allocate “6,935” — no dollar sign attached — to fund a portable water station. The email said “REAL” wants to look into putting small printers and water fountains in dorms.

Every single year, someone on SGA thinks the biggest change they can make at this school is giving their dorm a water fountain. I like water. It keeps us alive. But we already have a lot of water. You know what students don’t have? Any real legislative influence over actual school policy.

If “shared governance” is going to mean more than funding projects, student leaders need to stand up and assert an actual right of not just “shared governance,” but real governance.

The College Voice also needs to do better. This year, we have tried to improve our News coverage of the College. But we haven’t covered SGA as much as we should have. Going forward, here’s what we plan to do and here’s what we need from SGA:

The College Voice will cover SGA elections before, during, and after they happen. In the past, The College Voice has struggled to regularly cover elections and has failed to report basic election results. For some unknown reason, SGA itself has rarely reported complete election results, instead only announcing who won an election. The College Voice will be publishing election results, including vote tallies for every candidate. For this, we will need the assistance of SGA to accurately report election results. Twice this year, the SGA Chief of Communications has sent The College Voice blurry screenshots of election results. It is unclear how it is technologically possible to take a blurry screenshot.

The College Voice will cover systemic trends of SGA elections. We hope to find out why executive board positions are often uncontested. We also hope to find out why voter turnout is almost always so incredibly low that SGA extends voting periods to meet a 20% turnout threshold. Recently, the winner of school-wide election for Chair of Equity and Inclusion received only 125 votes.

The Assembly must maintain an easily-accessible record of anything that happens during SGA meetings. Formal agendas, minutes, resolutions, and more should be accessible to anyone at the College. SGA should also consider recording meetings to eliminate the week-long waiting period before SGA minutes become official record.

SGA must also reform the Chief of Communications position to ensure professionalism and create a more formal line of communication between SGA and The College Voice. This year, The College Voice has struggled to communicate with the Chief of Communications. Between blurry screen shots of election results and multiple instances of questions going unanswered, SGA’s communications officer has not been formally open with us. Many members of the assembly have been incredibly open at times, including the vast majority of the executive board. However, this happens informally, from peer to peer, not from newspaper to student government.

The student body’s lack of interest in SGA must be frustrating to SGA representatives, particularly for those student government leaders who have put in hard and honest work over their many years on the Assembly. Students do care what happens at this school, either at the level of policy or at the level of what impacts students’ everyday lives. But SGA needs to go beyond water fountains, communicate better, and expand the definition of student government at Conn.

There are some on campus whose lack of engagement with SGA derives from a belief that SGA can’t do anything, that “shared governance” is an illusion, not a reality. Those people might say that if SGA tried to pass legislation that altered Student Code of Conduct and Honor Code policies, administrators simply wouldn’t listen. This concern is completely valid. It is certainly possible Dean Cardwell would enter into a despotic rage if SGA were to pass a resolution that tried to change any features of the Student Handbook or disciplinary policies.

The College will eventually have to give respect to a Student Government that demands it. If the College abides, it will make shared governance for the student body legitimate. If it doesn’t, it will be explicitly defining “shared governance” and “honor code” to be marketing bullet-points that help convince Boston-area high schoolers that if they come to Conn, they can leave their laptop charger on a library table and they can advocate for their very own water fountain.

Whatever the result, expect The College Voice to cover all of this. If we don’t meet those expectations, hold us accountable. Better yet, come report for us.