Geofilters and Nutella: Is Student Council Useless?

At assembly on Tuesday, all the presidential candidates stepped up to the podium and announced what they would implement if elected. Many decried the ineffectiveness of the current Student Council (StuCo), one candidate even going so far as to claim that the only things accomplished were a Snapchat geotag, Nutella in Elm and a really horrible Vs policy. Over the weekend, Facebook was abuzz with endorsements for candidates, claiming that they would be better and more willing to enact change than last year’s StuCo leaders.

It seems pretty clear that students do not want to see any more ineffectiveness in Student Council. But is StuCo doomed to always be ineffective?

There are several problems in play, but first: some background on the organization. Student councils are found in nearly every school in the U.S. and were first conceptualized on the belief that student government would allow students to have a hands-on experience with democracy. By having a say in how their school was run, they could take more responsibility for their school and their own duty to be democratically responsible.

But StuCo officers, though widely recognized as holding positions of power, still have to answer to faculty and administration. If a candidate is elected on the premise of altering some significant portion of the school, administration could still easily end the alteration if they so choose. Administration, due to liability or budget concerns, might shut down a student council project, ending StuCo’s effectiveness in that area. Should administration stop enough major StuCo reforms, the organization will be forced to make small changes on campus.

Perhaps the leaders of StuCo are not the leaders best equipped for their positions.

The fault with StuCo’s ineffectiveness may not lie wholly with administration. Perhaps the leaders of StuCo are not the leaders best equipped for their positions. One of the greatest advantages of student council is that the student body can vote for their leaders. This can lead to some disadvantages; many students grumble that it is a popularity contest rather than an official post, with the positions going to the student with the most friends, not the best ideas. Sometimes it is considered a resume booster, using the implied authority to get into a good college and not to better the school.

A problem singular to our school and the way our student council works is that the actual decisions are not made by elected leaders. Those who attend StuCo meetings and are put into committees make many of the calls for what is and what isn’t implemented. If StuCo is not being run properly by its leaders and participants, then it will not make a huge difference in the school community. Still, StuCo’s main goal is to improve the lives of students at Exeter. This year’s StuCo certainly accomplished that, even if the improvements were tiny. I, for one, appreciated eating free Nutella. Considerable changes also are not internally implemented by the school, but rather outside forces which force Exeter to break from tradition and cover new ground. The Harkness teaching method was conceptualized by a donor, social and cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s brought girls to campus and feelings today prompted the change in the dress code. Maybe the goal of StuCo, then, is to keep tabs on students’ needs and to implement modest changes between the visionary ones.