If you haven’t paid attention to Student Senate over the past two months, don’t worry, you’re not alone. If you have, however, you’ve likely noticed the uproar over the process of filling the Asian-American senator seat. To paraphrase the Student Senate Parliamentarian, James Longhofer, 60 percent of the senate’s time this year has been spent discussing and debating the issue.
This is a shame, but the time was not entirely wasted, as it has forced us to fundamentally re-evaluate our notions of representative government as practiced on this campus. This controversy could have happened with any empty seat, not just a special interest seat, but it has raised a few questions nonetheless. Should umbrella organizations affiliated with the seats have a voice in determining who represents them? Do CHAS, Asian Council and ABS speak for all Hispanic, Asian and black students? Most important of all, though, why are there special interest seats in the first place?
There is no compelling reason for special interest seats to exist. In fact, there are compelling reasons against their existence. The first and most important of these is that it is inherently undemocratic. All students at SMU are represented in Student Senate by the senators of their school. That means an English major is represented by a Dedman II senator, an undeclared major by a Dedman I senator, a freshman by a first-year senator, and so on. This means that every single student, including minority students, are represented in the senate. By having an additional representative in our governing body, minority students gain an unfair advantage in influencing student government policy and legislation. A group with power disproportionate to its size wields undue sway; one additional vote is often of little consequence, but it is the potentiality of another voice in the chamber to persuade others that is the real danger.
Thus, the status quo violates the very principles of representative democracy. At the point at which the legislative body no longer actually represents the population it purports to serve, the body is corrupted.
Furthermore, the existence of these special interest seats rests on a completely arbitrary bright-line rule. Once a minority population at SMU reaches 150 members or more according to the Registrar’s records, that population may petition the Student Senate for an ethnic minority seat. The problem is, this process is rife with capriciousness. What constitutes an “ethnic minority”? Who decides which populations are minorities and which aren’t? I could easily and reasonably argue that red-headed people of Irish-German descent represent an “ethnic minority,” and my argument would have just as much validity as those for the present special interest seats. This is clearly undesirable, though, as it would open the floodgates to a mass of claims by those wanting extra representation on senate.
There is another fundamental conflict between the theory of representation and the practice of it in Student Senate. A representative system of government represents its constituents without any qualifications; that is, you and I are not distinguished in our state and federal governments by differentiating characteristics. To these governments, we are simply citizens and therefore due representation according only to that qualification. Put simply, the only constituency is that of citizens. This is not the case in Student Senate. There are two constituencies: that of schools and that of ethnic minorities. Once again, there is no compelling reason to have additional constituencies. Imagine the chaos if our federal government operated in a similar manner. I could demand that the body of sophomore finance and economics majors at prominent Texas universities be given representation, or that professional football players with two or more children and a summer home in the Hamptons should be considered a separate constituency. The proposition is clearly ludicrous and so implicitly undesirable.
An argument I’ve encountered in previous discussions on this is the minorities on campus are disadvantaged in some way and so should be given more to compensate. This borders on affirmative action and so is almost an entirely different subject, but I will touch on it here. Whether affirmative action is justified in the “real world” is completely irrelevant to this debate. In an academic setting, all students are treated equally, as there is no income to be earned, all costs are the same for all students and every student has an equal opportunity to study and participate in whichever programs they wish. Thus, no student is advantaged or disadvantaged within the school system itself, so there is no reason for compensating representation.
Some may reply that students with multiple majors in different schools are doubly represented as well. This is true, and unfortunate, as there seems to be little will to remedy this in the current situation. Student Senate should be looking for a way to do away with this discrepancy as well; perhaps a student would only be counted among a school’s population if it was his or her primary major. The difference with the special interest seats is that in the meantime this wrong can be easily righted. All it would take is a bit of courage, persistence and conviction.
John Jose is a sophomore finance and economics major. He can be reached at [email protected].
