Can you name your Student Council representatives? How about which committee to contact if you have a problem with printing costs? If you're like most Wahoos, chances are you neither know nor care. The current structure of Council is bulky, opaque and inaccessible. Thankfully, enough pressure has finally caused the cogs of change to move, and it is imperative that this newfound momentum of reform not be lost.
Sitting before the representative body tonight is a bill to completely restructure the presidential committees. In essence, the legislation would nix eight committees and group them under new "super-committees." For instance, the super-committee for diversity would have under it a vice chair for racial & ethnic affairs, a vice chair for women & gender affairs, and a vice chair for religious affairs. Each vice chair would, if necessary, have a committee of people working under him or her.
This new structure is similar to one found in the business world or in a government agency, and allows for more collaboration (all vice chairs can meet and pool resources), more recruitment (only eight committees instead of 14) and more flexibility (if a new issue arises, a new vice chair can quickly be appointed).
While Council should be lauded for its efforts, the restructuring cannot stop here. The time is ripe for change: There is a veteran representative body that understands the inefficiencies of Council, chairs who have always been ready and willing to better serve the students and an executive board that is finally showing some initiative. In the twilight of President Daisy Lundy's term, it appears she is ready to make good on her campaign promises of reform.
The next step is to carefully scrutinize the state of the representative body. As it stands, if you are a student in the College, you have seven representatives, and each of those representatives has 8,000 constituents. Such a system makes communication in either direction nearly impossible; the average student is not going to learn seven names and seven e-mail addresses, and even the most extraordinary representative cannot adequately hear the concerns of so many constituents.
As a result of this cumbersome logic of representation, the representative body is anything but transparent or accessible. It is exceptionally hard for representatives to reach their constituents, something frustrating both to the representatives who want to serve their electorate and the students who find their representatives useless.
The only argument for the current representation methods comes from a logistical standpoint: There are few simpler ways to divvy up the students than by school. However, just because representation by school makes elections simpler is no reason to allow a flawed and ineffective system to continue unchanged.
The options for reform are wide and numerous. For instance, most large Universities (the University of Florida and Penn State, for example) employ a representation system that in some capacity divides the campus into geographical districts. Often these regional partitions are supplemented by at-large representatives elected by class and/or school.
A reformed representative body brings with it a host of benefits both for Council and the student body. Council will be accountable, a major issue in its recent loss of credibility as anything but an organization for politico resumé-padding -- a characterization which is unfounded. With an accountable Council, students can feel comfortable going to their representative with an issue if they only have one name to remember, one e-mail address, one phone number.
Whatever Council decides to do, it at the very least needs to sit down and have a serious conversation on the current state of representation and brainstorm ideas to improve it. Council needs to hold a constitutional convention.
Encouragingly, the executive board has been very receptive to the idea, as have many representatives. It is important, however, that nods of consent actually turn into groups of Council members sitting down and coming up with a tangible product. The groundwork should be laid over the next seven weeks to put a constitutional amendment about representation on either the fall '04 or spring '05 ballot.
It's student self-governance in action.
Elliot Haspel is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He recently resigned as Student Council's religious affairs committee chair, and is now in no way directly affiliatedwith Council. He can be reached at ehaspel@cavalierdaily.com.
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