WSA committee structure defeats purpose of elections

On Thursday night, Argus writer Greg Dubinsky emailed me about my resignation from the WSA. I replied to him with a response which I expected to be dissected and simplified, through no fault of his own. However, in light of the recent article, I have been asked by supporters to submit the entire response as a Wespeak, if only to clarify the position.

The way the WSA works is that each elected representative, whether freshman or at large, is internally elected by the WSA into one of their sub-committees. From a bureaucratic standpoint, this makes perfect sense, but in a democratic standpoint, it makes absolutely none. While the information of who is on each committee is available to any student at Wesleyan, the student body has very little say who is placed on said committees. And some of these committees hold a tremendous amount of influence over every student at Wesleyan, such as the Finances and Facilities Committee or the Educational Policy Committee.

However, given there are 37 representatives vying for only a handful of these coveted positions, many representatives, especially freshmen and newly elected representatives, are shuffled down into positions on committees they themselves (or their respective supporters) may not hold very much interest in at all. This negates the point of the frustrated student body trying to get new representatives with new ideas into WSA if, for example, they wished to engage in meaningful discussion with the faculty about the upcoming change in the government major requirements (an issue addressed by the Educationa Policy Committee[EPC]) but must serve on the Community Outreach Committee because of internal elections.

Given that the WSA itself admits their meetings are excessively long and exhaustive, only students with the most exceptional patience could possibly tolerate the system as it stands. While I respect patience as a virtue, if that’s the only reason our representatives get to the positions they’re at, it’s no small wonder that students at Wesleyan feel disheartened by their inefficacy.

While I am sincerely flattered by the write-ins, I resigned simply because the WSA as a system, in my opinion, has grown content in its own stagnation and takes great pains to maintain its status as such.