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STUDENTS GATHER BIG IDEAS ABOUT
SMALL-SCHOOL GOVERNMENTS
ELEVEN COLLEGES SENT REPRESENTATIVES TO A
HAVERFORD CONFERENCE DESIGNED FOR SMALL SCHOOLS, WHERE THEY
OFTEN HAVE AN INFLUENTIAL ROLE.
By James M. O'Neill
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Yeah, political junkies still have to wait months before the Republican National Convention hits town. But hey - pols of a younger vintage converge from across the country for their own unique gathering this weekend.
Student-government reps from 11 small liberal-arts colleges are spending the weekend at Haverford College to schmooze, share advice, grumble about the rigors of office, and take in some of the same Philadelphia sites likely to impress Republican politicos next summer.
Jennifer Adams, from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, wants to learn how to downsize her school's unwieldy student assembly. Connecticut College's Minor Myers wants to know how students at other colleges are improving town-gown relationships. Richard Park, from Pomona College in California, hopes to discover how to raise the big bucks necessary to lure big-name speakers and bands.
The University of the South in Tennessee, Washington and Lee University in Virginia, Carleton College in Minnesota, and Trinity College in Connecticut, as well as Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford locally, are all sending students.
The gathering was the brainchild of Haverford senior Jesse Ehrenfeld, who, after attending a meeting of Swarthmore and Haverford student government reps, came away amazed at the number of issues and hurdles the groups shared.
Ehrenfeld, student council copresident, attended a recent conference in St. Louis, dominated by representatives from large universities. "There's nothing like that geared to students from small liberal-arts schools," he said.
So, he invited 40 selective small colleges for a weekend that will let students trade experiences and hone leadership skills.
Student-government organizations at these small schools do far more than dole out revenues from student-services fees to campus clubs. The student leaders are in weekly, even daily contact with deans and college presidents, and often are consulted for input. Some sit on college trustee boards.
And they claim more autonomy than counterparts at some larger universities. Ehrenfeld recalls the shock of some students and administrators in St. Louis when they learned that Haverford let him attend the event unchaperoned.
At Bryn Mawr, student government president Libby O'Hare points out that on her campus, SGA stands for self government association. At these small schools, turnout for student government elections often tops 50 percent, while bigger universities are sometimes happy to see a 10 percent turnout.
Political activism among college students is not as visible as in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Vietnam protests shut down campuses, or even in the 1980s, when students set up tent cities to protest South African apartheid.
But today's student-government entities do serve as conduits between students and administrators over politically charged matters.
"You see it more in pockets," Park said. At Pomona, for instance, one student group is gathering signatures to pressure the board of trustees to divest the school's holdings of companies whose practices they think harm the environment.
"Once they get the petition ready, I'm sure they'll bring it to us to pass along, since we're the institutional link between students and administration," Park said.
More often than not, today's student governments find themselves working in concert with administrators to solve problems.
"As a 'civilian' student, I often thought of the administration as this amorphous, faceless power," said Bryn Mawr's O'Hare. "But from working with them, I know they're not evil, and their goal is not to keep students from having fun. One part of the job I like best is explaining to my friends what the administration is thinking."
Perhaps the most common issue student governments grapple with today is balancing students' desires to maintain access to alcohol with the push by uneasy administrators to stamp out binge drinking.
Often, student government representatives are caught in the middle. "There's a little tension there," Park said. But, he added, "the administration has been very helpful trying to find a way to promote safe drinking."
At Mount Holyoke, the student government has played a central role in fashioning a new alcohol policy for the campus, said Adams, the student government vice president.
Another perennial campus issue - town-gown relations - also has started to fall into the student-government purview. For Connecticut College student government president Myers, it was the issue he built hiscampaign platform around.
Connecticut College lies just outside downtown New London, and the school is boosting its downtown presence to spur development there. "A critical factor in all this," Myers said, "is student involvement."
He said he wanted to encourage students to think of downtown as a viable shopping destination, to pump money into the local economy. He envisions a network of special deals that local businesses could offerstudents as incentives.
"It's a way to link altruism and some more basic economic initiatives," Myers said.
©1999 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.
