The Student Government Association (SGA) announced the formation of the SGA Reform Working Group, which, according to an email sent out by SGA President Taylor Custer ’15, is designed to “examine the efficacy of student governance on campus.” It was created in part to examine the information gap between the administration and students, which has undergone recent criticism with regard to changes in the tailgating policy and other social life issues on campus.
Custer describes this issue as a lack of transparency between the administration and student body.
“On some things, they don’t communicate; and then on others, there’s this gap between what the administrators think the student body knows and what we’re actually focused on and talking about,” Custer said.
Custer added that he was frustrated to first hear about the tailgating policy through a school-wide email.
“For a lot of the administration it was a management issue. So for those directly involved in it, they never thought about it as something that students would need a say in because it was a safety issue from their perspective. Whereas if you had asked any student beforehand they probably would have said this will be a big deal for students,” he said.
Custer hopes that going forward, the group will create a forum through which students can get involved with the decision-making process earlier.
The group will examine the relationship between the administration and students. It will also evaluate the student-SGA relationship and will focus on increasing awareness of the role of the SGA.
Custer said, “It is by no means just a reaction to what happened with the tailgating issue.” Custer also sees the lack of interest in last year’s SGA elections as an indication of a larger issue.
“The fact that people didn’t seem to want to run and the lack of general interest in it is, to me, a huge problem. If students aren’t interested in engaging with the SGA it makes it that much more difficult for the SGA to argue for policy or try and speak for the student body,” he said.
The group has been split into two groups with different functions.
“One [will] work on the SGA side of things and the other [will] work with the administrative,” Custer said. “For the SGA side, it is figuring out how we’re going to find out what can be better in terms of student engagement. What issues do students currently have with the SGA? Do they not know who is in it? Do they not think it has the power to do anything? What is the reason for the lack of engagement?”
This side of the group will identify problems, while the administrative side will look further into how the administration is set up.
“The idea would be that we’ll learn a lot about how the administration works and which people govern what,” Custer said.
To do this, the SGA has been looking into the administration part of the website and talking to faculty members to understand its structure, which, to Custer, has proven to be a confusing and complicated task.
“One really helpful resource is going to be our staff advisor Doug Adams [Associate Dean of Students for Residential and Student Life]. He’s been here for 15 years and is sort of our institutional memory,” said Chief of Staff Danny Zhang ’15. “He knows what past SGAs have done, and obviously how the administration works.”
Going forward, the group will be able to submit recommendations about changes in policy to President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz, who has told Custer he is very open to the idea of students getting more say in administrative processes. These recommendations will come in the form of a list, which will have to be voted on by the SGA Senate and Community Council. “It can be slow and the ultimate ability to actually make the change is in the administrators’ hands rather than students’. I think that’s just a reality of being students in a college. To a certain extent, we have to be okay with making an argument, getting the evidence and saying, ‘This is why the change should be made’. At the very least, then the administration has to give us a justification for why they’re not going to accept the recommendations,” Custer said.
Custer is hopeful that the group’s recommendations will actually be approved. He added that administrators have been very genuine about trying to be more transparent going forward.
“I do think they’ll take a lot of the recommendations, whatever they are, from the working group seriously and enact some of them,” he said.
