The involvement of students in the self-governance of residential halls has been part of the college experience for a long time. The importance of balancing power between the administration’s traditionalist oversight over dorms and apartments and independent consideration from students actually living in residence is the core of a healthy college experience. Being able to bring up concerns about issues ranging from common room furniture to academic support with elected students living in your building is a valuable asset that isn’t utilized to its full potential. As we are slowly crawling our way back to how the campus looked prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, this moment also has the potential to be a vehicle for changing the way student government outreach and community events function.
A major roadblock to creating a more valuable student government for all undergraduates and graduates is the low turnout in Student Association (SA) elections. Even before the pandemic began, turnout in SA elections at Binghamton University had been very low. Back in March of 2019, just over 2,000 students cast ballots for SA executive offices. For perspective, during the 2019 to 2020 school year, the total number of undergraduate students enrolled was 14,165. This is a very common problem for colleges across the United States in both public and private schools. Among “Big 10” schools in 2019, the highest student government election turnout was only 16.4 percent. While these rates seem extremely low, they are actually quite comparable to voter turnout rates in many municipal and primary elections. Since students are only temporary residents of their campuses and student governments have limited power, students may believe that voting in SA elections is unimportant or not worth it — a pattern similar to voter turnout rates during off-year elections. With such low participation and low name recognition of elected student government officials at universities, diversity of ideas and perspectives will undoubtedly be lacking. These numbers obviously do not bode well for high participation in events and social campaigns at the community-wide and hall-wide levels of student government. However, similar to in municipal elections, candidates who use social media campaigns to increase the value of the SA in the eyes of the voters during the election season may be able to increase turnout.
With such low participation of students in both elections and actual events run by the student government, we must look for ways to increase the student population’s involvement in important government events and facilities. Both at BU and many other universities, student government plays an important role not only in budgeting and chartering organizations and services for the general university population but also in championing progressive social and civil change. An example of this is a recent resolution signed by student governments at all eight Ivy League universities to call for near-total fossil fuel divestment. At BU, the SA, Women’s Student Union and other chartered organizations worked collectively to establish and promote the Violence, Abuse and Rape Crisis Center (VARCC) in response to the campus-wide outcry regarding sexual assault and rape. However, the promotion of the VARCC to all students across campus should be increased to address name recognition issues common with new facilities. The SA can possibly accomplish this through expanding social media campaigns that already exist to promote the VARCC by holding seminars with staff members on Zoom or in person a few times throughout the semester, mandating that residence hall government members attend these seminars and advertising the meeting times to the general student population. Additionally, including ways in which students can provide digital feedback and concern either within weekly emails or by a specific anonymous Google Form on the SA website would be great. Members of the SA Congress should also be required to meet one-on-one with the residence hall governments in their communities to promote legislation the SA is currently acting on.
Now, I’d like to turn more toward residence hall governments in particular, which provide great opportunities to build tight-knit communities and foster environments in which campus life can become more vibrant than it had been even before the pandemic. Whether it be academic tutoring, sporting events, movie nights or hall-wide discussions, the opportunities to expand the limited impact of residence hall governments at BU is one that should be taken advantage of. One important first step could be creating and revising new residence hall government constitutions to give executive boards more responsibilities and communication between hall governments and residents. It is my belief that the most effective way to institutionalize communication is through requiring meetings between the different levels of student government as well as meetings between hall governments and collegiate professors — all of which should be written into hall constitutions. Basing these changes on residence hall constitutions at other public universities could be helpful. For example, BU hall governments could use SUNY New Paltz’s approach, in which each residence hall e-board has a separate constitution that stands in agreement with the community-wide residence hall e-board constitution. The difference in the BU approach and the New Paltz approach is demonstrated by their constitutions or the lack of them. BU currently does not have any constitution which outlines specific roles and responsibilities of individual hall government officials, meeting structures or even requirements for communicating with residents. This would obviously be a positive organizational improvement, and it would help hall e-boards understand their roles and responsibilities early on in the fall semester. Also, the SA E-Board and Congress could consider slightly increasing the budgets of hall governments, so that they could petition to use the funding for more fruitful community events, and so that they can modernize the way in which community-wide governments allocate funds to residence hall governments.
There should be no doubt that residence hall governments should expand their outreach to residents and increase their responsibilities as we try to bring back normalcy and successful community events to BU. The SA and hall e-boards can work together to reform community government budgeting and outreach methods and hopefully can also greatly increase student participation along the way.
Sean Reichbach is a freshman double-majoring in economics and philosophy, politics and law.