CAMPUS

Student Government: An imperfect solution, but the best one

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
– Winston Churchill

Representative democracies have problems. They frequently suffer from low turnout elections, wasteful pork barrel projects, and a legislature that is out of touch with the people they are supposed to represent. A student government is not at all immune from the problems of real government.

Yet I ask my fellow posters: just as republican democracy is, presumably, preferable to an autocracy, is not a student government, with all its flaws, preferable to the alternatives?

A student government, as I see it, primarily exists for two purposes. First, to allocate student fees. On the first point, I would much rather prefer that the students at any given university decide how to allocate fees to students than the college’s administration. In a democratic system, you at least have the ability (even if it is underutilized) to vote out individuals who make bad decisions. In a college administration, you are certainly not facing a democratic process. Odds are, you will be facing a bureaucracy filled with career administrators who have little accountability to the students who pay the fees.

Second, to advocate student concerns to governments and the college’s administration. Most student governments are given an ex officio role in their university’s governing process, sitting on campus decision-making boards. This enables students to select people that they might actually like and agree with to sit on these entities. Again, the alternative is a group of people picked by, you guessed it, career administrators who have no accountability to pick individuals who represent students.

I fully expect my fellow participants in this roundtable to give horror stories about what they’ve seen in their student governments. I assure you I could provide some horror stories of my own. Yet, faced with the alternative of undemocratic student representation or no student representation in decision making, I’ll go with student government — the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been invented.