In this issue every year, the Editorial Board talks with all the candidates running for SGA President and endorses one. This year, however, for the first time in as long as we can remember, there is only one candidate: Taylor Custer.
We fully support Taylor for President and encourage everyone to vote for him and to vote generally in the SGA elections. But what does it say about the SGA and about the student body that only one person is interested in running?
Being SGA President is a big, and often thankless, job. It is a huge time commitment on top of a full course load, and, while there are perks, it is hard to balance with everything else. On such a small campus, it is hard to escape the constant pressures of everyone knowing who you are and wanting something from you. While some students view this as glory, the job is exhausting. And that is part of the reason our current president, Rachel Liddell, is not running again even though she is only a junior.
In addition to the lack of competition in this race, the scale of the platform has changed. Last year, Rachel ran on an ambitious platform, looking to secure internships for credit, increase local food in the dining hall, revitalize 51 Main, overhaul distribution requirements and provide more equitable access to athletic trainers. Taylor’s platform is significantly scaled back, looking to extend Thanksgiving Break, provide access to syllabi to give more information when we are picking courses, and partnering with local restaurants to create a revamped system of the MiddKid card. While these are all good ideas, what does this reflect about what the SGA believes that it can accomplish?
While Taylor’s platform would increase quality of life for most Middlebury students, he did not touch on the major issues that we think the next SGA President should tackle, including the incoming dining swipe system, the push to change the AAL requirement and the search for President Liebowitz’s replacement. In addition to addressing these issues, we hope to see Taylor contribute to the important dialogue around sexual assault on this campus and engage with the growing concern around student body image that MiddBeat has been working to highlight.
Though this year’s SGA has made progress — creating MiddCourses, adding printers, setting up cafes in BiHall and the CFA — the larger efforts of Rachel’s platform have been sidetracked or flat out rejected, like the internships for credit proposal was voted down by the faculty. To many students, the SGA allocates student organization funding, and it does not seem like they have the power to do much else. A quick look at We the Middkids yielded two standard responses: “we asked around and it just won’t work” or “that isn’t in our jurisdiction, try this person.” This further begs the question of what the SGA actually has the power to change.
Much of the SGA’s power comes through recommendation. The SGA can pass along bills, but for many changes, including the curricular changes that have been pushed for over the past few years, the real power lies with the faculty. Internships for credit is a prime example. The SGA put in a ton of legwork to get the faculty to bring a bill to a vote, but it still failed because most faculty members did not bother to show up and vote. With big faculty decisions on the curriculum coming up next year, notably on changing the AAL requirement, we must learn from our mistakes and be a bigger voice next time around.
Even though we already know who will win, it is important to vote for Taylor to show that there is student power in the SGA and that Taylor stands for us. We cannot let Faculty apathy set a precedent for our engagement. In a vote that lost by five, what would have happened if the SGA President sent out an all-school email the night before imploring students to talk to their professors about voting yes? We have the power to influence these decisions, but we have to exert it. We at the Campus can do a better job of tracking these meetings and presenting the relevant information, the SGA can do a better job of increasing transparency so students know what they are doing, and we the students, the consumers of this education, must stay engaged and informed to hold the College and the faculty accountable for the changes we wish to see here.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
