May 16, 2007

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.

13 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:53 PM

    Niral's a fuckwit. Seriously. Have you seen how tight his fucking pants are?

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  2. Anonymous5:12 PM

    How is Malchow Malchow showing voting stats for the trustee nomination when the official press release isn't up yet?

    The link from Smith's name [he won] goes to http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2007/05/17.html

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  3. Anonymous6:51 AM

    Malchow knew the results 6 weeks ago. The fix is in.

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  4. Anonymous3:20 AM

    David Nachman is an '09.

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  5. Anonymous9:38 AM

    So Little Joe whines today about Prof. Sloboda's "misrepresentation" of Stephen Smith's religious beliefs.

    But when you read Sloboda's letter, he doesn't mention religion at all. (Unless Joe dignifies the pigheaded scientific ignorance of "intelligent design" by raising it to the status of religious belief...)

    I say Joe is the one doing the misrepresentation, and in an especially anti-intellectual way. Lame.

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  6. Anonymous10:54 AM

    No post on the recent trustee election?

    No report on the biggest news event of the academic year? No scathing defeat for your enemies?

    Is this site a group of fairweather pundits? Do you not write unless you win? Is it that tough to just act as contrarian to another one of Malchow's posts? How will you fill the gaping hole in your post history?

    Could you have been wrong about alumni sentiment? 55% seems like a fair amount of the vote; wow, turnout was high too....

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  7. fairweather pundit? christ. who are you people. i'm shacked up in dick's house with an IV in my arm. feel free to keep up the hypothetical responses to what I might have said about the trustee election though...

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  8. Anonymous12:58 PM

    why the iv? catch something nasty over gkw?

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  9. Anonymous5:38 PM

    How will you fill the gaping hole in your post history?

    This is hilarious.

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  10. Anonymous3:20 AM

    This blog is dead. There's still dartblog, dartwire, and super dartmouth, but the day Seal decided to focus on his thesis was the day liberal blogging at Dartmouth died. Congratulations Shah, Shepherd. You two had a vibrant, active blog handed to you on a silver platter and have managed to run it into the ground.

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  11. Anonymous2:30 PM

    yeah, the only two blogs that actively post are dartblog and dartlog - both conservative

    what the fuck

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  12. Anonymous3:41 PM

    I wouldn't say vibrant but at least Seal took the time to put up posts. 2 posts in three weeks, come on guys.

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  13. Anonymous12:36 PM

    How will you fill the gaping hole in your post history?



    Rock-Star presidential candidate on campus; you guys lucked out. Worth a few hundred vapid words right?

    Anything else of note anywhere in the world? Playing social at Tabard all weekend?

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