Dear Undergraduate Council Candidate,
First off, I would like to congratulate you on deciding to run for office. It is admirable that you have chosen to dedicate so much time to improving your college, and I greatly respect your enthusiasm and love for Alma.
That said, I have spent some time looking at your campaigns, and you generally display a lack of understanding about what it is that council members do. It’s not your fault—having covered the councils for four years, I can tell you that this has been going on forever, and it’s a shame. So I am writing in an attempt to nip it in the bud, such that you can better understand the jobs to which you are aspiring and tailor your platforms accordingly.
Let’s begin retroactively. Councilmembers: you didn’t make off-campus flex happen. It came as a result of administrative action beginning in 2004, before any of you were students. The goal was to remove Social Security numbers from all of the CUID cards to make them more safe, which would, in turn, allow the kinds of off-campus swipe systems which had already been in place at Harvard, NYU, and Cornell for years. The student councils played almost no role in this beyond helping the administration decide where to first implement the swipe machines. Please, stop campaigning on the issue.
This is part of a general theme: the administration generally does what it wants. Sometimes that coincides with the Council’s wishes, and when that is the case, administrators are usually willing to share credit with the councils. That doesn’t mean councilmembers led the charge. It’s an important distinction and one worth remembering.
Now, many of you have expressed your support for an “ethical expansion” into Manhattanville. Seems like a good tent-pole issue—I don’t know anybody who would argue the opposite—but I have a few questions. What exactly is an “unethical expansion?” Are you implying that Columbia is expanding unethically? What would you do to make this expansion plan more ethical? Please be specific.
Additionally, I encourage you to remember that the expansion started before you were a student and will continue well after. As such, the University values student input, but that only goes so far. Calls to completely stop or dramatically alter the $7 billion expansion are probably not going to be heeded, even if they are accompanied by a hunger strike. After all, the administration tends to have its own goals. (See above.)
For those of you clamoring for more student input on Manhattanville, I direct your attention to last week’s panel where Provost Alan Brinkley, University Senate External Affairs Committee Co-Chair Sharyn O’Halloran, Vice President for Manhattanville Capital Construction Phllip Pitruzzello, and a handful of leading academics on urban development showed up for a discussion on Manhattanville. Fewer than 30 students came. It’s not that there are no venues for input—it’s that few take advantage of the ones that exist.
A note to all those who are applying to be University Senators: By its very definition, the Senate doesn’t care about undergraduate-specific issues. The body was formed to represent all constituencies within the University. Those of you who are running to get more resources for dorms, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, undergraduate advising, or who have centered their campaigns around getting the University Senate to pay more attention to Columbia College, please reflect. Otherwise, you may find yourself very bored at the meetings.
As the Council found out two weeks ago when it asked about the feasibility of blocking juicycampus.com from Columbia’s servers, CCSC also does not get to control Columbia’s Internet access. Sorry. The Councils have also proved to be highly ineffective at forcing CUIT to put Wi-Fi in the dorms. The issue has been around at least since the time I came to Columbia nearly four years ago, and has seen little progress despite the fact that none other than Bill Gates has called it a “clear” priority for the school. I urge candidates to consider these past failures as a preview.
Candidates: realize that unless you have the funds to accomplish your goals without administrative support, all resolutions that you pass will be non-binding. I find that repeating this at frequent intervals helps to keep things in perspective.
So what do the councils do? They pass resolutions and issue statements that hopefully represent the student body. They throw parties that hopefully don’t run out of ice cream or beer. If they are seniors, they invite Class Day speakers. A few years back, they brought about change in the alcohol policy at Baker Field. And they sometimes get flown out to California to recruit incoming students.
Most importantly, though, they are the students with the most direct contact with administrators—a responsibility that should be taken heavily, because they speak for the rest of the student body in these conversations. Regardless of any other proposal or initiative, council members’ main and most difficult job is to fairly represent the views of their constituency—a diverse, disparate, and disjointed student body.
Finally, a plea to the eventual winners: don’t act like Machiavellian power brokers. There’s no reason to go behind people’s backs, form secret alliances, or lie to Spectator—even off the record. You can be up front, honest, and to the point. Hell, it might even allow you to make progress on some of the issues you care about.
I hope you will heed my advice and wish you the best of luck in your respective campaigns.
Sincerely,
Josh Hirschland, CC ’08 and 2007 campus news editor