Notes from the desk Let's talk about my paycheck

Author: Ben Salkowe

Here's something you probably did not know: The Student Government Association paid me about $30 to manage production of the newspaper you are reading. As part of my $1,200 stipend for the academic year, I consider the paycheck a generous token of appreciation for the time and energy it takes to keep this paper going. But honestly, I would like more.

I am not talking about a raise. In fact, next year student leaders will be lucky to receive any form of compensation. Administrators are at odds over whether it is legal to pay someone so much less than minimum wage - my stipend works out to about $1.20/hour - or whether it is ethical to pay students for extracurriculars at all. But given the announcement that the College is planning to offer $2,500 stipends to junior counselors next year, it seems any logistic or ethical questions are negotiable.

It was that news that junior counselors would be receiving stipends for their work, which set me thinking: paying junior counselors shows just how conflicted administrators are over how to recognize the hard work of student leaders.

The problem is, extracurriculars that consume student leader's lives are never really jobs, but they are always more than benign side activities. So why not treat these positions like classes?

Take the junior counselors, for example. Rather than bribe upperclassmen to become junior counselors with a paycheck, why not give them the option of enrolling in a counseling class so they could receive academic credit for their mentoring and advising of first-years. Their leadership positions would no longer be "jobs," but field placements for a greater academic experience. With only three other classes, they could devote more time to their first-years and exemplify the Commons spirit of learning beyond the classroom. But why stop there?

For leaders in the Student Government, why not allow them to enroll in a bureaucracy course where their work in the Student Government could become an on-campus internship? Maybe it would raise the prominence of SGA elections. Maybe it would help committees to get more things done beyond the classic online survey.

And I'm not done yet.

For the editors of this newspaper, why not allow them to enroll in a journalism workshop for which their work on this paper would be real-world training? Having a set-time to study journalism each week would allow us to examine what we do and discuss our work.

Or maybe it would be enough to make one big seminar on leadership for students at the head of all these organizations to meet each week, brainstorm ideas, troubleshoot problems and learn from one another's experiences?

To be fair, it is currently possible for students to create independent study projects for just about anything, but then the burden falls on the student to not only manage a student organization, but to also lead an independent study.

So why not take those thousands of dollars that are about to be smothered all over the junior counseling program, and think of a solution that's more creative? Appoint an inventive professor or staff member to identify learning opportunities outside the classroom that are significant enough to count for course credit. And hey, you could even give us a raise, too.


Ben Salkowe is a senior political science major and the Editor in Chief of The Middlebury Campus.