Every couple of years, citizens of democratic countries have the chance to vote and hold their elected lawmakers accountable. As college students, we have no equivalent institution at our disposal that would hold responsible those whose policies directly affect our lives here on campus. The failure of student protests to bring about change on issues from the river docks last summer to the meal plan this term reveals the extent to which means for asserting our rights are largely stripped from us when we enroll as students in college. Short of storming Parkhurst, there appears to be no way for students on this campus to have their opinions heard en masse in an effective manner.
It is easy to lay the blame for this on students, criticizing the manner in which they've gone about protesting some of the College's policies over the years. We can point out the lack of student zeal in putting actions behind our rhetoric. We can point out the lack of participation by student representatives in the process and criticize Student Assembly as this newspaper has previously done ("Verbum Ultimum: Inadequate Assembly," May 20). And finally, we can point out our lack of organization as the cause of this failure to have our voices convincingly heard. But in focusing on self-critical analysis, we ignore the true power inequities that exist at the College. The very fact that students must resort to protesting as their only means of protecting collective interests shows that the power dynamic on campus is grossly skewed.
Aside from self-criticism, students, and especially columnists like myself, have endlessly blamed this frustration on one person President Kim. But while it is easy and somewhat comforting to connect our frustrations with a name and a face, such targeted criticism obfuscates the underlying problem. Until students have some way of voting for or against administrators, or at least for or against their initiatives, we will continue to occupy a position of powerlessness on campus. Inequality will persist and generations of students who come after us will repeat the same meager attempts at change that we have exhaustively tried.
The way in which this College and most others like it is run is hypocritical at best, and perversely totalitarian at worst. While the virtues of democracy are preached to us in class, these sentiments do not seem to echo from the walls of the classroom to the offices of Parkhurst. What makes matters worse is the fact that we as students fund this enterprise year after year, feeding exorbitant amounts of tuition money to a bureaucracy that neither fully understands our complaints nor is forced to hear them out. As such, the cycle persists and students spend four years under an administration that need not and cannot hear our collective complaints in an effective, timely and powerful manner. Until students have voting power to influence College policies and hold administrators accountable for their decisions, the College will continue to be operated like an autocracy.
While college is presupposed to be a time of personal growth, wherein we enter as teenagers and leave as adults, such an expansion of our intellect apparently does not coincide with an expansion of our rights. Though the College's decisions are supposedly made in our best interest, these decisions are nonetheless made for us and without any accountability. As a result, they cannot possibly take our best interests to heart. As citizens we can vote in federal, state and local elections and influence policy that may not yet impact our lives, but as students we have no formal way of influencing the policy that has impacted, and will continue to impact, our time here.
Until our voice can be democratically heard with power behind it, nothing will drastically change. We will continue to argue amongst ourselves over why our petty protests fail to sway the minds of aloof College administrators. We will paint President Kim as the face of our discontent, deluding ourselves about what is truly amiss. Until the administration treats us like the adults that we are, provides us with real power to direct this campus and is able to be held accountable, it will continue to bully us.
