Staff Editorial | Critical discussion missing from VSA decisions

On Sunday, Nov. 12, the Vassar Student Association (VSA) Council voted to amend Section 1 of the VSA by-laws to create five new committees that will each directly report to one of the five members of the VSA Executive Board. These committees will be composed of existing members of the VSA Council. According to the 11.6.06 issue of the Council’s publication VSA Today!, they were created “to improve the efficiency and productivity of the VSA.”

Whether or not the committees will help minimize bureaucracy or compound it is a perplexing debate. However, The Miscellany News staff takes larger issue with the fact that the motion for creating these committees passed unanimously with no public discussion at Council. Although this was the second week of discussion on this by-law change, it is nevertheless unsettling that a large structural change to the VSA garnered no debate directly before voting.

Sunday’s meeting was just one of several at which important decisions were made with little or no discussion. The VSA has certified several organizations this year, meaning each is now eligible to receive VSA funding provided by the student activity fee. For each certification discussion, a representative of the organization was present at the VSA Council meeting. In most instances, these representatives were not asked any questions by the VSA before their organizations were approved. There is seemingly little concern as to whether these organizations actually benefit the campus or merit VSA funds.

Physical meeting spaces and financial resources are not overly abundant on this campus; thus, the decision to certify an organization should not be taken lightly.

In past years, Council members have asked several questions of representatives applying for official VSA organization status. These questions would be about the organization’s mission statement or why they felt they could not join an existing group with a similar purpose. Past councils would at times discuss among themselves the precedent being set by giving a new organization official status. For example, when the French Club applied, the 2004-2005 VSA Council discussed at length the possibility of other majors forming clubs, and engaged in debate about the claim that majors’ programming needs should be satisfied by majors’ committees, not VSA organizations.

The newly certified organizations this year such as Vassar ACLU, Future Waitstaff of America, ACT OUT, and others are certainly active groups which have interested members. But the role of the VSA Council ought to be to ask questions of the organizations in the public setting of the weekly Council meeting, and to consider how adding another organization will affect the rest of the campus.

The most recent example of a lack of discussion during Council is the certification of ACT OUT, formed last spring with the mission of challenging the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which has quickly gained a large membership. A portion of this membership is actively committed to civil disobedience. At their most recent demonstration in New York City, six members were arrested. One would think that a student governing body would engage in a public discussion before granting funds to an organization that encourages civil disobedience. But no one on Council asked a single question of ACT OUT’s representative before unanimously voting in favor of certification.

Student organizations have a large impact, and involvement in these groups is an integral experience at the College. The Miscellany News is not arguing that ACT OUT or any other organization certified this year does not deserve this status, but rather that no matter how benign an organization or how complete an application, our governing body should always have questions.

The Staff Editorial represents at least a two-thirds majority of the Editorial Board.