GUEST COLUMN:Seth Hamalian's Vision: Responsibility and Efficiency

What does the UA do?" The most frequent response -- "Nothing." Why does the UA do nothing -- because it is not responsible for anything that students are really impacted by. SPEC does social planning, SCUE deals with undergraduate education, and we all experience the fruits of their labor, whether it be Spring Fling, a recently released movie shown on campus, better general requirements, or greater access to interdisciplinary minors. But SPEC and SCUE are not even considered a part of the UA, even though they deal with the exact issues student government should be working on. In fact, the current constitutional structure has the UA as adversaries to SPEC and SCUE. SPEC, SCUE and student government should be synonymous. Elected students should be working hand-in-hand with the students who already voluntarily join these highly effective organizations. If a number of the elected representatives shared in the responsibility for running SPEC and SCUE, the "do nothingness" of student government would be eliminated. Concrete responsibilities would mean elected reps could be judged based on their performance, on the quality of social planning, and the improvements made to our educational environment, not the cleverness (or lack thereof) of their campaign slogans. But the key is shared power, and shared involvement in SPEC and SCUE by both elected and non-elected students. For example, each of the programming boards of SPEC should still exist, and still be run by and consist of non-elected students. After all, we don't want such important responsibilities as campus-wide social planning and undergraduate education to be the responsibility of a club, but we also don't want the same people who take two hours to decide on the funding of a copy machine to be in charge of Spring Fling! Speaking of funding, I can tell you one thing that's not going to make any aspect of student life function any better -- giving elected government responsibility for funding all groups on this campus. It doesn't take a genius to know that this would only accomplish the following: 1. Give way too much power to people who clearly have not proven themselves capable of complex, let alone basic, budgeting. (If the copy machine costs $15,000, and lasts five years, and student groups spend over $10,000 per year on copies, isn't it obvious we could be saving money by buying it, not to mention providing Kinko's with a little competition so they'll stop acting like providing same day service requires divine intervention?!) 2. Encourage even more spoiled brats and power-hungry ingrates to join student government (remember how all this year they tried to impeach everyone who didn't cooperate, and decided to not even show up every time they didn't get their way -- feel the shivers going down your spine as you think of these same people controlling your group's funding). 3. Make already intolerably long SAC meetings even longer. SAC already has enough internal conflicts over who to fund without having to fight the funding decisions of people who aren't even directly responsible to SAC. As stated above, SAC doesn't need to be controlled or funded by popularly elected representatives. But what it does need is internal restructuring. SAC meetings are inefficient because they are too big and full of individuals who feel no vested interest in what happens. SAC groups should meet in smaller numbers only with other groups that have similar interests or purposes. Each of these clusters could then pick one individual to be responsible for casting the cluster's votes on issues of recognition and funding (eliminating the need for every individual group to have a rep present), and one individual to serve as an advocate, knowledgeable in SAC's complex rules, and prepared to assist groups in navigating these rules to get funding and recognition. These clusters could also pool resources to purchase items they use in common, and share ideas and contacts for getting things done on campus. Oh, and one more thing. Consolidation is really popular these days, but we still need a third branch of student government to run elections and handle appointments to committees. It would be nice to think that elected reps could run their own elections, just like it would be nice to think all students are honest and objective enough to grade their own tests. But in the real world, government has checks and balances, and you'll never see congressmen counting their own ballots!