March 9th, 2009
I’m glad to see CJ implicitly accept my second tenet for the necessity of student government. I expected the first to be more contentious, so I’d like to elaborate my views further.
Viewpoint neutrality and Downs’s Argument
Professor Downs, who is cited in CJ’s argument, writes an essay that — on its surface — might be critical of student fees. In fact, Downs brings up one of the best arguments in favor of the student fee process — viewpoint neutrality. Essentially, this means you can’t discriminate event-by-event based on viewpoint. My student government can’t, for example, legally fund pro-choice groups while denying pro-life ones.
Downs is absolutely correct that “the Court provided no guidelines on what constitutes viewpoint neutrality or discrimination”; this is what happens when new caselaw is created. As more caselaw is created, the guidelines will become clearer, but until then we know one thing — if a student government corruptly discriminates, it is illegal and anyone can take recourse in the courts. Is a recourse like this ideal? Of course not. Is it good to have a check and balance above student governments? Of course.
“A microcosm of a bad democracy”
I agree that student governments can be prone to low turnout. That being said, my student government at William and Mary has much higher turnout than local elections in our community of Williamsburg, VA, so I’m not just going to accept that this is a problem that must exist. If people that they have a choice and feel that the issues affect them, they will vote. I also agree they can be prone to corruption, but again, I’d put my student government’s funding process among the least corrupt of any government I’ve seen. Corruption and cronyism don’t have to happen; on campuses with high voter turnout and a strong press I would view these as very rare, and when they do happen they can be dealt with quickly.
I don’t really agree with the institutional memory issue. We have a faculty advisor who provides advice on allocating student fees who has been around for 10-15 years, and many students stick around student government for four years.
Alternatives
As it is right now, CJ seems to provide no alternative whatsoever to student government, or any mechanisms for how it can be reformed. I’d be interested in hearing them, since the alternatives I can see are quite undemocratic and authoritarian.
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March 5th, 2009
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.
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