Considering the relative indifference of students towards the spring elections, one would think that Monday’s results would please those of us who long for more student involvement in choosing the people who run Student Council, the Honor Committee, and the University Judiciary Committee. Turnout was huge for a University election: 48 percent of the College voted as opposed to 36 percent in 2008; a stunning 59 percent of first years participated, up from just 41 percent a year ago. However, there is a simple explanation as to why so many people came out to vote in this election: the honor single sanction reform amendment referendum. In fact, the turnout from previous years shows that without referenda on the University’s honor code, students don’t come out to vote in the same numbers. The fact honor referenda have such a marked effect on turnout demonstrates that while the University and its students constantly glorify student self-governance, in reality there is general indifference towards deciding who will represent students in the bureaucratic process due to the consistent disconnect between the student body and its own administration.
In the last seven elections, whenever there was no referendum that could affect the fate of the single sanction, the turnout in elections was far lower than in years with them. In 2003, University Board of Elections records show that the turnout was 27.5 percent while last year’s was 28 percent (neither counts the School of Continuing & Professional Studies). On the other hand, in 2006 and 2007, turnout was 36 percent, and in 2005 a whopping 40 percent came out to vote (the record high since UBE started recording turnout numbers). Each one of those years featured referenda dealing with the honor code, whose results altered the wording of the code’s third criteria from “seriousness” to “triviality” and shot down many efforts to change or work towards changing the single sanction. This year, turnout was 38 percent, following this trend. Naturally, this data highlights the importance of the honor code in the minds of University students.
Yet a closer look at this year’s numbers reveals how much less students care about the people who will represent them than the single sanction. Whereas 7,727 people voted on this year’s honor referendum, 6,600 voted for the Student Council presidency. Nevertheless, that being an always competitive position (particularly this year), another significant position, Vice President for Organizations, saw only 5,736 voters, nearly 2,000 less than the honor referendum. Fourth-year Engineering student Mike Stefanelli commented that he didn’t vote on many positions because he didn’t “want to be an uninformed voter.” Other students have told me similarly. While it is admirable to not want to affect an election that one doesn’t feel qualified to vote for, the fact is that students should be making an effort to become informed. It’s not hard to read up on the positions of candidates on their Web sites or Facebook; the same goes for visiting the University Judiciary Committee’s or Student Council’s Web sites to get a better grasp of what they do here at the University.
The problem is that even if apathetic students were to go check out the specifics of the Honor Committee or some individual running for College representative to Student Council, they would still feel relatively detached from the process of student self-governance. Aside from CIOs, where this does go on, the University Judiciary Committee, the Honor Committee, and Student Council exist in their own bubble in the eyes of most University students. The fact so many feel uninformed isn’t just their fault: these representatives often fail to accomplish much that affects students’ daily lives, making elections for these positions unimportant to a majority of University students. For example, does the College Readership Program really impact many students when most of them get their news from online sources, including the ones that are coming in paper form as a part of the program? These representatives also end up forming something of a mostly benign aristocracy, which we can see with the common view of the Honor Committee as this big, secretive operation. If these vital parts of student self-governance at the University, who determine funding for student groups or judge who has committed honor or criminal offenses in the school’s eyes, continue to be perceived as lacking in accountability and openness, the general malaise towards anything not related to the honor code will only grow larger, compromising one of this school’s core values.
There is more to student self-governance than the honor code. However, much of the student body only exerts itself over alterations of the honor system, exhibiting indifference towards deciding who should be our representatives on the University Judiciary Committee, the Honor Committee, and Student Council. But this is a two-way failure as the governing institutions seem incapable of transforming important parts of student life, leading to voter apathy year-in and year-out. Only serious reforms and major changes to our current system that encourage greater student involvement can counteract this disturbing trend, like more meaningful interaction between Student Council and student groups or opening up the Honor process to more public scrutiny. Hopefully, these kind of changes will come about in the near future; otherwise, there will be only further disinterest in student self-governance at the University, destroying one of its defining tenets.
Geoffrey Skelley’s column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at g.skelley@cavalierdaily.com.
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