Last week, the Voice ran a front-page article called “Student government orgs. fail to generate interest” that I contributed to in the form of an interview. In that interview, I tried to stress that the two organizations, Student Government Association (SGA) and Campus Council (CC), have had two distinctly different experiences in their respective elections and overall processes through the course of their development in my time at Wooster. However, the article conflated the struggles of SGA with those of CC when, in fact, the only problem they have shared this year is reduced competition for seats. Given that lack of nuance in that article, I wish to share my thoughts on Council directly.
This election had a candidate for each seat by the filing deadline, and five of the nine seats were contested while five seats had no candidates running. While viewing the Council election in a vacuum makes it seem like there is some lack of interest, historical context is necessary to understand it. When I ran as a first-year in 2016, there were just seven candidates for the four at-large seats. The constituency seats did not fare much better. That election frankly failed to generate interest, with few contested races, low turnout and a number of your representatives failing to participate in Council at all, missing many meetings and doing nothing to engage with you.
Seeing that election was disheartening to me, and so we set forth to build structures to improve interest in Council and give the students more access to their representatives. We created the Council candidate forum, which gives the students unparalleled access to the candidates, allowing the students to vet the candidates themselves. We also established the Outreach Committee so that Council would have members dedicated to disseminating Council’s work to the student body and organizing events that give students face to face time with their representatives. These changes have boosted interest in Council across the board, and the level of interaction and work that the 50th Council has done this term are beyond the engagement efforts of any past Council.
What I think creates the perception of a “failure to generate interest” was the anomaly of the 2017 Council election. Never before had Council had to review a student organization, and the effort of Chair Jack Johanning ’17 to ensure transparency and fairness meant that every member of the student body was able to see the review process firsthand. As a result, interest in the Council election blew past our expectations. An unprecedented 14 people declared their candidacy for at large representatives, four for civic and service and at least two for every other constituency seat. Turnout was also at a three-year high, driven by the intense interest that the review generated. Thus, this level of engagement was anomalous. Fortunately, no subsequent Council has had to deal with such a contentious and sensitive issue, and hopefully, no Council in the future will have to.
The 2018 and 2019 elections are in many ways a return to normal, with turnout and candidates matching and exceeding the elections in 2016 and 2018. The past two Council elections are a product of the 49th and 50th Councils doing the important, but honestlys unglamorous work of governing. In fact, turnout this year was only slightly down from the 2017 election and even up from the previous year. Campus Council is not experiencing a crisis of student interest. The same cannot be said for SGA.
Furthermore, only examining the number of candidates obscures the work being done to improve engagement, something that has not been reported widely on. A more comprehensive definition of Campus Council engagement reveals that the past two Councils, and especially the 50th Council, have been making incredible strides to involve the students overall. The 50th Council has put in place weekly “Coffee with Councilmembers” where two representatives sit in the Pit and are available for conversation. They’ve led a number of panel discussions, presented their work and made their presence known through more art walls and social media than the previous three Councils combined. Over the course of one school year, they have gained 440 Instagram followers. They’ve even collaborated with the Voice to make policies clear. Council visibility will only increase for the next two weeks while we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Council. Council has even partnered with Digital Collections to create a digital archive of historic Council documents that will be widely accessible. These efforts have not gone unnoticed by campus, even if they were absent in the Voice’s article last week.
Simply put, the current Council is connecting with the student body more than any other Council has done before. In many ways, it is the Student Government Association that has an interest problem driven by its own failings both internally and externally, and I would encourage the Voice to look deeper into those issues. Council, on the other hand, is more involved than ever before, with the nine student members doing work more appropriate for 20 students. If you’re interested in engaging with Council, I encourage you to seek out their many events, attend a meeting or email any of the sitting members.
Jordan Griffith, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at JGriffith19@wooster.edu.