After attending the most bureaucratic Student Assembly meeting I have yet to take part in this past Tuesday, my frustrations focused on two points.
One involves the "ad hoc committee on procedure" which has been much publicized this past week in The Dartmouth. The members put forth great efforts for causes they believe in but the results I found to be fairly pointless.
First, even though they had a right to complain about the dubious appointments by Student Assembly President Nicole Artzer '94 and to contest them, the only possible outcome all along could have been the one which resulted -- that the president will wait another week (two weeks maximum) until all her appointees become voting members and then simply reappoint them. This must have been realized all along by the members of the committee and their time simply seems to have been wasted.
In addition, the committee intelligently decided that a change in the rules of procedure for this year's Assembly was in order and that a report of their proposed changes and additions to the current ones be read at the meeting. They were indeed, but the immediate problem was that no one would be able to see what they were amending and changing -- i.e., no "hard copies" of the rules of order were to be seen.
It is standard procedure to always have such copies (ideally one per voting member) present to view and consider. The failure of the committee members who proposed the changes to provide them resulted in a great farce. One committee member said we couldn't even know how to change the rules without any rules of procedure to go by. So it was decided that we would have to wait a week even to consider the rules and the proposed changes before carrying on any new business.
Even a simple proposal for publicizing SA votes had to be waived because of the bureaucratic mess created. Especially confusing was the fact that the motion to put off the vote on the rules was sustained by a member of the amazing ad hoc committee on procedure.
Again, those members are all responsible and brave students whose adherence to principle will well serve themselves and the Assembly in the long run, but I only hope they learn use their energies more productively. They can do a lot of good this year if they put their minds to it.
Second, I found a major double-standard in the President's opening statements which The Dartmouth made a story out of on October 6. She stressed that we must think of "the students" first and put aside personal or political attachments which may lead us away from serving the students' desires.
These words were clearly prompted by the politics surrounding the committee pre-mentioned and how its members negated the seven of her appointments to the executive committee who were not even elected to be voting members. I see hypocrisy in this statement
It would seem obvious that in holding her esteemed principle, the best course of action when making her appointments should have been to appoint at-large representatives who were chosen by the student body last spring!
There are 21 of them and surely more than three were qualified to be on the executive board. Moreover, they are representatives the students elected in good faith and this faith should be respected not overridden.
The American people would be outraged if the Speaker of the House appointed any non-Congressperson to chair a congressional committee.
The same logic applies here at Dartmouth. If the president hopes to best serve the students, she has not acted appropriately and hopefully will take the protests into consideration before setting about reappointments.
In fact I only agree with one of her points -- a point which none who suffered through Tuesday's meeting will contest -- that we must stop regressing and must start being progressive this coming Tuesday and not stop until June.
