Student Governance Task Force

So I'm a little late on the uptake, but yesterday, the Student Government Review Task Force issued its recommendations. The full version was blitzed out to campus, and if it becomes available online, I'll update with a link. In the meantime, DartWire has a pretty comprehensive guide to look at, and Dave Nachman '10 chimes in on his new SuperDartmouth blog.

While Nachman pines for the radical Shpeen-revolution that never was, the strength of this report actually lies in its painfully boring pragmatism and attention to bureaucratic nuance. It calls for streamlining and coordinating funding allocation, changing voting and candidacy requirements, instituting campus referenda, direct election of certain committee chairs, and an overall reorganization and redistribution of responsibilities and committee structure. In it's most ambitious proposal, instead of pushing for a young trustee (an unsuccesful campaign of numerous SAs past), they advocate a formal liason and gradual re-evaluation and, ideally, expansion of the significance of this role.

Of course, it's still SA, and so painstaking research doesn't always equate to reasonable expectations. The centralized online calendar thing has been tried before, and though making funding contingent on its use could force groups to post, it's not going to make campus use the thing. The plan to "Advertise happenings every fortnight in The Dartmouth and send out campus update blitzes every full moon," besides being absolutely bizarrely phrased, gets to the point. SA, as I have opined, is at its best when dealing with campuswide minor issues. For SA to fulfill this purpose more efficiently and visibly might decrease our collective disdain for the organization, but its pretty unlikely to stir up more interest.

So, once again, no revolution will appear to save the day and shake us all from the terrible apathy in which we disregard the great things SA has done for us. Still, while it's hardly inspiring, we probably will all benefit from an SA that is more introspective, realistic, and marginally more efficient each year.