Let's Make a Deal

One month from now, students will be asked in a referendum to double their term bill student activities fee from $20 to $40 thereby doubling the budget of the Undergraduate Council. Three years ago, as a council member myself, I spent several weeks drafting and presenting a proposal calling for a referendum to double the term bill fee. But in retrospect, I am glad my idea went nowhere; then as now, the council simply did not deserve the raise.

It is important that we not blame the council members or leadership for asking for more money. This is no more their problem than it is ours; they have volunteered their time to "serve students," as council types like to say and should be thanked more than they commonly are for that.

All the same, appreciating their work is a far cry from buying into their mindset. The fact is that being on the council is kind of like being inside the Beltway: things people outside consider petty (say, impeachment) seem, to those within, like the most essential matters in the world. When I was on the council, we all thought what we were doing was terribly important. Yet we failed to see that all around us our efforts were being ignored or scoffed at. Although things have gotten better since then--internal e-mail is way down, and meetings are shorter--too many council members still spend more time haggling over parliamentary procedure than talking to their constituents.

One first-year representative, Francesca Petrosino, grew so infuriated last month when the council rejected a binding referendum on how to spend the council's recovered $40,000 that she decided to resign. In her resignation letter, Petrosino recalled her disgust at the debate about that referendum: "I watched elected representatives fool themselves that they somehow were more entitled to make a decision allocating the 40k than the students they claimed to care so much about. We are nothing without them, yet we think and behave as though they don't matter once they give us their vote....I don't want to be connected with this self-important, voluntarily and fiercely isolated organization that couldn't possibly be more out of touch with what representative government really means."

That's the way it was four years ago, and that's the way it is now. Before the council deserves more of our money, it must do at least one thing: become representative. That means, simply, having competitive elections. And that means, simply, reducing the size of the council. It is the one and only way in the immediate future for elections to mean anything, for people to start paying attention to the issues and for the members to have any legitimate claim to be anything other than an especially large and time-consuming student group that gives out grants.

It is illuminating, in fact, that the council now says it needs more money primarily to better support student groups. Just four years ago, many council members considered funding student groups much less significant than funding campus-wide social events. But then a wave of antisocial liberal students (myself included) stormed the council and tried to shift the focus away from planning dances to activist issues, lobbying administrators, funding student groups, anything but planning dances. That worked for a short while, until people realized that for all our hot air, we weren't really getting anything done.

So out went the progressives and in came the pragmatists, who tried making the council relevant again by working on small issues that directly affected people: Fly-By lunches, cable television and, of course, funding student groups. The latest council administration is ostensibly trying to move back to bigger issues, but the greatest emphasis still seems to be on student groups. Planning big events and dealing with big "political" issues have rhetorically and practically taken the back seat.

What has happened to the council is in fact very much like what has happened to the federal government of late: after years of failure on significant matters on both ends of the political spectrum-from health care to a flat tax-both sides have turned to the little things in the middle at which they can be successful: military wage increases, school uniforms, the so-called marriage tax.

Funding student groups is really just a smoke screen, then-hiding the fact that the council is largely impotent to do anything other than follow a procedure for giving out cash to people who ask for it. And there's even a big question in my mind as to whether student groups need more money. The term bill hike would mean, according to the council's hypothetical budget, that $180,000 would go to that purpose alone-a $100,000 increase over the current level of funding. There is something to be said for not giving every student group as much money as it claims it needs.

The current leadership lobbied for a council downsizing bill earlier this year, but it failed at the hands of representatives who either bought ridiculous arguments about a bigger council meaning better representation or, more likely, feared that they would not be re-elected to a smaller council. But it's illogical to expect the council to vote to shrink itself, and that will likely never happen. Which is why, with the council coming to us for a change, and down on its knees and begging at that, now is the time for constituents to cut the council a deal: We will give you more money if you cut your size.

In the short run, this may mean voting against the term bill hike in the April referendum, unless the council is prepared to reconsider (and approve) downsizing between now and then. Short of a "constitutional convention" to draft an all-new student government--not a bad idea in itself--this kind of pressure may be the only route students have to making the council accountable and legitimate. And once legitimacy is attained, even just a little legitimacy, a lot more will be possible than doling out dollars to student groups. Geoffrey C. Upton '99 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Wednesday.