Deja Vu at the IOP

After months of effort, numerous surveys and hours of meetings the Task Force responsible for reconstituting the now-disolved Student Advisory Committee (SAC) released its draft proposal for student involvement in the IOP last week. The result: A plan that looks eerily similar to the old.

Pryor dissolved the SAC last November because of its insularity and its failure to draw students to IOP events and activities. SAC had become an organization devoted to political infighting, not exciting students about politics. It is hard to see how the recent proposal will change that. The contentious elections for president and vice president of SAC will continue, the SAC committees which were hotbeds of student-staff conflict remain prominent. The only concession, it seems, is the end of SAC self-selection process. Instead, all students who have attended enough committee meetings can run and vote for leadership positions.

While this may solve some of the internal problems, it does not address the conflict between students and staff. To understand this problem properly, one must know that SAC is not a student organization. SAC was created as an advisory body (similar to the senior advisory committee that meets semesterly to advise the IOP staff) to ensure the IOP provided activities students would learn from and enjoy. What SAC became was a self-aggrandizing group fighting for complete control over IOP programming.

By seizeing control of IOP programming from staff, SAC wasted time and energy duplicating or even hindering staff efforts in those areas. The IOP staff is a group of professionals hired to provide the best possible political training to undergraduates. Their hands have been tied by student efforts to micromanage their activities.

This is not to say there is no role for student input at the IOP. Pryor should accept a proposal that gives students a strictly advisory, not programming, role. Staff should consult students at least once a semester about the programming provided and about their ideas. Students should brainstorm with staff a wish list of events. Student political and activist organizations should collaborate with the IOP to organize activities. But these organizations should remain administratively separate from the IOP.

Undergraduates should adopt political causes, found political organizations and participate in campus politics. They should do all this independent from the IOP, drawing on it as a resource where they can find political mentorship, a forum for political debate and place where they can find logistical support. Ironically, SAC encourages students passionate about politics to remain outside the political arena by becoming entrenched in SAC. The IOP was founded to inspire students to pursue politics. But it is not a place for students to exercise political leadership, as was so aptly demonstrated by the actions of SAC in recent years.

Pryor was courageous to reconstitute SAC. His actions gave many hope that the IOP would become a place of political mentorship and debate, not bitter infighting and ruthless politicking. Pryor should not back away from the challenge he posed in November by accepting this retrograde proposal. There is no courage in repeating the past.

Dissent: Students Deserve a Role

We are genuinely baffled by the staff's position on this issue. While the IOP may not be a "student group," scores of campus organizations seem toaccomplish their goals despite the handicap of selecting their leaders in open elections. The Crimson, for example, manages to put out a paperdaily even while engaging in the despised method of self-selection. Is democracy that much of a barrier to serving students effectively?

Envisioning a self-selecting SAC obsessed solely with politicking is in some way reasonable, although we would contest the view. But whatever one thinks of SAC's past, with what politicking would future elected leaders occupy their time? Planning for re-election? For that, they must convince other students that they are deserving -- hardly a perverse incentive.

We are also confused by the staff's call for the reduction of studentinfluence at the IOP to one or two open meetings a semester. If thestudent members of the Standing Committee on the Core Program -- again, not a "student group" -- were summarily dismissed in such a fashion, therewould be howls of protest, and rightly so. This page has repeatedly called for student membership in the Administrative Board and a formal student role in the selection of the University president. It does not matter if a subject may have been handled by administrators in the past; the staff should uphold at all times the ability of elected students to discern what their peers want and act capably to effect it -- through formal channels, not "wish lists."

We hold with our position of last December, which stated that "initial elections based on objective criteria for eligibility serve as a good model for the future, providing for more open and inclusive student leadership." No new reason has emerged to support the abolition of student leadership at the IOP. Students are what attracts students to theInstitute, and many of the IOP's most successful programs have been realized only through the ideas and efforts of student leaders.

In a single editorial, the staff has managed to come out against precedent, student control, democracy and good sense. We praise them fortheir efficiency, but we wish it had been used to other ends.

--David M. DeBartolo '03, Rahul Rohatgi '03 and Stephen E. Sachs '02