On a late February evening, nearly 200 students gather in Sellinger Lounge, anticipating the scheduled announcement of results in this year’s hotly contested election for GUSA president and vice-president. The election marks the third year since GUSA instituted online voting, replacing the old paper-ballot system, and results are expected within an hour after polling closes. As the minutes tick past the 9 p.m. deadline, the crowd grows restless. Finally, election commissioner Ramya Murali (SFS ‘03) steps before the students to announce the results.
But there are no results. Due to a mix-up in voting lists, nearly 300 students were not e-mailed ballots, and voting must be extended for an additional day. In the aftermath, two of the three remaining tickets are disqualified amid allegations of election tampering, illegal campaigning, and insider dealing. Brian Morgenstern (CAS ‘05) and Steve de Man (CAS ‘04) are ultimately declared the winners, with by a slim margin.
“The election was fair and legitimate,” Morgenstern says afterwards, though his first act as president is to create a new task force to review and change GUSA election bylaws.
GUSA, the Georgetown University Student Association, has served as Georgetown’s student government since 1984. Throughout its history, incidents like the most recent election debacle have been commonplace. But while mistakes and mismanagement have served to erode student trust, one rarely discussed fact has been more influential. In 1983, shortly before GUSA’s creation, the student handbook printed that, “Student Government is a misnomer; it is not a government at all. Student Government has no sovereign power to legislate or enforce its will.” Little has changed since.
“GUSA is mainly an advocacy group,” Morgenstern explained. “In terms of [GUSA] resolutions, I see them most of the time as ineffective. They are not taken seriously.”
Whether students, or administrators, or both, fail to take the student association seriously, GUSA officers are all too aware of their lack of authority – but most of them appear unfazed by it. While other universities accord student governments considerable financial and political authority over administrative affairs that concern students most, Georgetown has exhibited a relative lack of student representation within its administrative structure, and shows little sign of changing soon.
Morgenstern said that while a handful of administrators listen to GUSA and take it seriously, the student association’s lack of a mandate for policymaking allows most to completely ignore its resolutions, unless they carry the support of faculty or the backing of some outside organization. Other GUSA insiders acknowledge that GUSA’s ineffectiveness cuts two ways. On the other side, students feel resentment that it doesn’t do anything, said first-year representative Dan Monico (CAS ‘06), and thus are less likely to become involved.
Matt Hopkins (CAS ‘03), a Voice staff member, is one of four senior class representatives in the GUSA assembly and a member of the Senior Class Committee. Hopkins said that he believes most students don’t realize that GUSA lacks the authority to enforce its resolutions, and therefore blame GUSA for not effectively representing students. Hopkins cited the recent resolution in support of exclusively serving Fair Trade coffee on campus, and the subsequent refusal of the Students of Georgetown Inc., which operates Uncommon Grounds, to comply with the resolution.
“It’s a joke. We passed the resolution, but we can’t force the Corp to do it,” Hopkins said. “We don’t have that power.”
Regarding this year’s GUSA agenda, Hopkins noted his frustration with the Assembly’s only partially successful efforts to get the administration to reverse the University’s lockdown of student dormitories, despite near-unanimous student disapproval. The policy was originally drafted over the summer without student input.
“What it comes down to is that we have no effective way to say, ‘this is something that needs to be done and we are doing it,’” Hopkins said. “There is nothing we can do to prove to them the weight of our interest,” he argued. “It devalues you as a student advocate when you realize none of your resolutions have any binding effect.”
While February’s election fiasco brewed, students were confronted with yet another housing crisis resulting from administrative mismanagement. Anticipating a surplus of beds on campus following the completion of the Southwest Quadrangle, the Office of Housing Services promised housing to any student who requested it for the following year. GUSA Housing Advisory Council members Morgenstern and Ed Shelleby (CAS ‘04) calculated the shortfall beforehand.
“There are administrators who do not show respect for student input,” said outgoing GUSA Vice President Mason Ayer (SFS ‘03) in reference to the Office of Housing.
When a similar housing shortage occurred in the spring of 2000, hundreds of students rallied in Red Square, some sleeping overnight in boxes in protest. Ultimately, the University rented an apartment complex in Rosslyn to house students for the fall semester. This time, no such outcome appears imminent.
“People have just stopped pushing it,” said Hopkins.
Further compounding GUSA’s ineffectual role within the university administration, even many of the most active students couldn’t care less about GUSA.
“Students in general are apathetic,” said outgoing GUSA President Kaydee Bridges (SFS ‘03) “We have a higher voter turnout than most schools, but we don’t have as much involvement as we would like. I think people just have other things to do. Club leaders want to be involved in their clubs and not in student government, and … there is not a huge desire by the student body to hold people accountable.”
“Combating apathy starts by having a more involved University administration,” Hopkins said. He suggested that administrators like Vice President for Student Affairs Juan Gonzalez should attend GUSA assembly meetings at least once a month or hold office hours weekly in the GUSA office.
In contrast with the GUSA’s irrelevance, as perceived by many student leaders, the Student Activities Commission, responsible for working in conjunction with the Office of Student Programs and for the allocation of funds to Georgetown’s student groups, is considered an indispensable, if overly bureaucratic, organization.
While GUSA executives appoint SAC commissioners, there is no direct accountability between elected student officials and the funding that is allocated to student groups, further contributing to GUSA’s political isolation from both its constituency and the administration.
“GUSA needs to step up and make an effort to see what their appointees are doing,” Hopkins argued. “I bet you couldn’t find any GUSA representative, or maybe one, who would know SAC allocations.” With all money for student programming controlled by SAC, whose budget this year is just over $200,000, GUSA has minimal fiscal recourse to back up any of its resolutions, let alone policies which the administration might oppose.
This year’s GUSA budget was $22,000 and even that, according to Ayer, was “a lot more than it should have been.”
“GUSA doesn’t have enough money,” Hopkins said, “If we had more money, we could effect more change. At the very least, representatives need to get more involved in seeing where the money is going.”
While GUSA representatives clearly grasp the limited extent of their influence on University policy, most seem to accept it as a fact of life, and don’t expect change any time soon. But as students at other universities have proved, student political impotence isn’t the norm everywhere.
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the state’s flagship campus, is home to over 17,000 undergraduates. At UMass, the Student Government Association consists of executive, legislative and judicial branches, and has far-reaching responsibility over services and activities that primarily serve students. Students at UMass each pay a $76 activity fee, which provides the bulk of funds for the SGA budget.
In addition to their responsibility for a $3.6 million annual student activities budget, funded from student fees and revenues, the UMass SGA has direct influence over housing and health services policy and the power to create new agencies employing full-time non-student staff to address needs that they feel aren’t being met by the university administration. For example, the Office of ALANA Affairs functions much like Georgetown’s Center for Minority Educational Affairs, but is administered mainly by students, with non-student support staff, the opposite of the organizational structure at Georgetown.
If Georgetown undergrads had the power that UMass students enjoy, issues such as hiring a new director for the Women’s Center, creating an LGBTQ center and the revision of campus disciplinary policy regarding rape could all be decided primarily by the student government.
Charles J. DiMare is the Directing Attorney for Student Legal Services Office, an SGA-created agency, and advises the SGA on legal matters.
According to DiMare, the role of students within the administrative governance of universities varies deeply between schools public and private.
“All of us that work at UMass are state employees, so we’re all accountable to the state, which ultimately is the students and their parents,” DiMare said. “If they complain to their state legislator, we lose our jobs. If all your faculty and staff at Georgetown are incompetent, you can’t complain to your legislators or congressmen,” he said.
At Georgetown, top administrative power rests with the Board of Directors, 45 individuals-mostly corporate business executives-which allows a non-voting student representative on the occasional subcommittee. In contrast, the UMass Board of Trustees, 22 members total, includes five voting student representatives-one from each campus of the university system.
DiMare explained that whatever the university, there is always a question as to how much responsibility they delegate to students and faculty. “It’s a question of how to best run the university while taking into consideration various viewpoints,” he said.
“Georgetown University is more like a corporation, and UMass is more like a public agency, in terms of governance,” DiMare said.
The administrative structure of the university explicitly includes student governance, DiMare said. He firmly supports UMass’s policy, and argued that all schools need to include students in the running of the university.
“Democracy is cumbersome sometimes, it takes longer, it’s clumsy. Sometimes it doesn’t make the best decisions,” DiMare said. “Private sector managers who think they know how to make the best decisions can just do things. There needs to be a compromise. The public sector needs to borrow from the private, and vice versa.” DiMare said that public schools like UMass can show private schools the value of democracy, and that private schools can teach public ones about more efficient management.
At Georgetown, the responsibilities that UMass’s SGA combines in one organization are broken up between a variety of administrative bodies-GUSA, SAC, InterHall and others-most of which include both students and administrators in the decision-making process, but to a degree that empowers of students far less.
Though the University of Massachusetts may rest on the opposite end of the spectrum from Georgetown in the authority granted to its student government, one doesn’t have to travel far from Healy Gates to find a more effective and respected student government. George Washington University’s Student Association, like Georgetown only has ‘recommendatory’ powers, yet it combines all functions of student representation into one umbrella organization, much like that at UMass, and levies a budget of $400,000.
In May of 1970, as a student strike raged at Georgetown amid anti-war protests, professors voted to end classes and cancel exams. The killing of four Kent State University students by National Guardsmen and President Richard Nixon’s decision to send U.S. troops into Cambodia earlier that spring sparked debate at universities across the nation over the role of student government within the university administration.
At GWU, students voted overwhelmingly to abolish their impotent Student Assembly as a political move to push for a “University Council” comprised of students, faculty, and administrators that would report directly to the Board of Directors.
Georgetown’s similarly feeble student government seemed on its way to reform on the heels of the student strike, led by student government president Mike Thornton’s (CAS ‘71) campaign promise to create a University Council like the one proposed at GWU. Student hopes were high, only to be stonewalled by University President Rev. Robert J. Henle, S.J. as students returned to campus in the fall.
“I don’t think that a university should be run as a democracy,” said Henle, president from 1969 to 1976. “You can’t run a university that way. It is vitally important to have a strong, central authority.”
The legacy of Henle’s words continues to be felt at Georgetown today. GUSA, created in 1984 , is simply the latest incarnation of disempowered student government at Georgetown.
Hopkins suggested that GUSA’s best course of action would be to draw attention to its lack of power through complete inaction, much like what took place at GWU in 1970.
“If they really want to be effective, they should do nothing,” he said.
