| READ AND RESPOND |
[27 Dec 2004|12:36am] |
A couple weeks ago, during a meeting of Geneseo's Student Association, the following question was raised: What would a Geneseo without SA look like? It was posed as a potential slogan for the upcoming pro-SA, pro-budget, pro-mandatory student activity fee referendum. Now I am, for the most part, in support of the mandatory student activity fee since it funds a majority of the organizations of which I am a part. It is also possible for a student to be refunded if he or she does not want to pay the fee. However, I sat in the back of the much regulated, very formal SA meeting--the President actually uses a gavel--and thought, Hmmm, what would a campus without SA look like? I knew what I was supposed to think--horrible! apathetic! unorganized!--but upon some further chin scratching, I thought maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.
For clarification before I launch into my diatribe, SA is the standard campus bureaucracy that is run by elected, undergraduate officers that are thought to represent the larger student body. As far as I can tell, however, most of them operate along administration-friendly lines which sometimes, believe it or not, aren't student-friendly lines. It's incredibly bureaucratic and a majority of the SA officers I've encountered revel in both the bureaucracy--"Um, I'm sorry but that budget realignment needed to be in at 3:30 and it's now 3:45"--and their position of representation which somehow gets misconstrued as a position of authority.
So I'm thinking to myself, what would a Geneseo look like without SA? Without all the red tape and rules about endorsing candidates and not hanging up flyers unless they're in designated flyers spots AND approved by the guy that approves these things? To say it has potential to be great or interesting or worthwhile is too simple.
Let me give you a common scenario that I've encountered both personally and through my friends: Fresh-faced, full of moderate enthusiasm girl or guy goes to an open meeting of the Womyn's Action Coalition or The Progressive Student Coalition or the Anti-War Coalition or the Muslim Student Association (I'm only using groups I’ve been involved with myself). Girl or guy sits through the meeting, either likes what she or he hears and comes back, or decides that the organization isn't doing the kind of projects that she or he imagined. The guy wanted to campaign for better access to birth control on campus but the Womyn's Action Coalition is only doing a project on Take Back the Night. The girl wanted to start a prison moratorium project but the Progressives are too busy working on their Minimum Wage campaign to take it up. And so on, until, and I think this happens a lot, you get a majority of the student body that wants to or would consider working on like-minded projects but has been disillusioned by the actual process of going to the meeting. After all, it ain't kosher to walk in to these established organizations and start, well, organizing. You gotta work your way up, you gotta be part of the bureaucracy. And hey, maybe it would be kosher sometimes but very rarely is someone going to have the guts to just go at it--why would they when it's set up/required to be hierarchal? So that fresh-faced enthusiasm, all the ideas and spirit, get lost because there is only ONE feminist group, only ONE lefty group, only ONE Latina group, etcetera. Any spontaneity is crushed because you can't just do it because you gotta make it official to get anything done, including access to room reservations, tables in the College Union for information distribution, and other resources.
A group I was involved with last year, the Geneseo Outing Club, has had a terrible time with SA recognition. Prior to their recognition process, when they held their interest meeting, over 50 people showed up. It was the largest interest meeting I've ever attended. Some dudes in their dorm room--freshmen, mind you--had the idea and started organizing trips. This year, as they wade through the complications of official recognition and funding, they've offered maybe one activity. Seems like the outing club could have survived much better if it had simply been a mailing list to which everyone could send emails and proposed trips: "Hey, I'm going bouldering this Friday, call me if you want in." That sort of thing. Instead, this group is paralyzed and the 50 people who showed up at the meeting are not going on trips, not meeting each other, not being involved.
Very often, among all the uber-involved folks who organize the SA groups on campus, I hear complaints about the apathy at Geneseo or how no one wants to do anything. Maybe I have too much faith in people but I think that there are interested parties; they're simply being strangled by SA, the nice, tidy Student Association. Sure, some people will sit on their ass but for the most part, good leaders are not one in a million. It's more like a dime a dozen. They just need to be encouraged, developed, and supported. Earlier this year, while I was working on a voter registration project with our "unofficial" organization Friends of NYPIRG, I learned invaluable lessons centering on this truth. Every person that came to a Think Globally, Vote Locally meeting was asked "What do you want to help out with?" It was different than any organization I'd been a part of before because it was entirely student-run, student-ruled, and group-organized. We welcomed ideas--even really bizarre ones--and maintained what I thought to be an integral self-consciousness. This project, while well organized, was somewhat anarchic in that it was often spontaneous, idiosyncratic, and subject to change; it seems to me that these qualities allowed it to be successful. There was room for every person to work on the campaign and every person could work on the campaign.
There have been other "underground" groups I've been involved with at Geneseo--I'm thinking the performance poetry group Inner Rhythms and this year's progressive collective infoSHARE--which lead me to believe even more in the potential of students to organize without SA. In regards to Inner Rhythms, and as I explained with the Outing Club, I think our attempt at SA recognition and the general move to act out of tradition and not spontaneous desire killed the group, at least in part. I'm not entirely convinced that SA is useless, that hasn't been my point however fiery my words are here. Certainly I think it's more useful for some organizations than others; in a lot of ways it doesn't make sense for "progressive" leaning groups. This question--What would a Geneseo look like without SA?--is worth mulling over. Maybe some room to move and breathe is what we need around here.
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