Downsizing Not the Way to Go

To the editors:

Unfortunately, The Crimson Staff has once again devoted its daily editorial space to bashing the Undergraduate Council (Editorial, Jan. 13). The Staff praises council downsizing as a way to "cut dead-weight" from the council and ensure competitive and interesting elections.

Many people, particularly current council members, think that this move would lead to increased credibility and respect from the students. However, looking at situations at other schools has not led me to that conclusion.

At the last Ivy Council conference (held for delegates from all Ivy League undergraduate student governments), the relationship between student governments and undergraduates was discussed. The common problems were that the student governments lacked respect from students, voter turnout was low (although Harvard has the highest turnout in presidential elections in the Ivy League), and few people believed that their governments had any effectiveness in determining university policies.

Based on the arguments about downsizing at Harvard, one might think that across the Ivy League, all student governments had "deadweight" to cut from a large membership, but this is not the case. Twenty students represent an undergraduate population of 4,000 on the Columbia College Student Council and fewer than 30 students represent 12,000 undergraduates on the Cornell Student Assembly.

Ironically, as we discuss downsizing, the Dartmouth Student Assembly has worked to increase participation and interest from the student body by increasing membership from 35 to about 70 since September. As our peers at other schools know, small student government membership does not automatically lead to great credibility and effectiveness.

For the council, decreased membership would be disastrous--there are already too few members serving on the council's finance committee, which is responsible for allocating close to $100,000 a year in grants. Do we really want to unduly burden members of such an important committee?

The key to creating an effective council is to change the council's structure. The current structure allows members to join a committee without taking on any responsibility aside from attending meetings twice a week. We need to make members work harder because they have tasks to complete, not because they have an increased load to bear with fewer members. ALEXIS B. KARTERON '01 Jan. 13,1999 The writer is Undergraduate Council Delegation Chair and Ivy Council Vice President for Internal Affairs.