Elizabeth Song | Trimming the fat

This Sunday night, the fate of over $1.7 million will be unveiled by the UA Budget Committee. Every spring, this mammoth sum is doled out to each of Penn's six student government branches, which carve up the money until it finally trickles down to you - the constituent.

Just pause for a second and think: $1.7 million. For the town of Emmitsburg, Maryland, that's more than the annual operating budget.

At Penn, however, this money might go toward travel fees for Karl Rove's recent visit, dance costumes for Penn Ballroom or styrofoam hats and canes for Hey Day.

If you're in the dark about this allocation process, you're in good company. Yet with over $1.7 million on the line, we can't afford to sit back. It's our money. How do we know it's being well spent?

That's a tough question to answer when most people aren't even aware of who represents them.

"You really don't know the candidates who are running, so you tend to vote for somebody random," Engineering freshman Fabio Raman said.

Every year, the line between student government and municipal government grows slimmer: burgeoning bureaucracy, lackadaisical elections, shadowy operations and yards of red tape. As Richard Simmons would say, it's time to cut the fat. Whip the structure back into shape.

Take Class Boards as a case in point.

According to Senior class president Puneet Singh, the mission of Class Board is to build school spirit. "It's one of the few ways to make a big university seem like a small university," said the Wharton senior. It means "pride in being at the University of Pennsylvania and being a Quaker."

Yet when I attended the Sophomore Class Board's Skimmer Speakeasy last year, I didn't leave with shining memories but with cheap glass beer lagers and oversized cotton tees.

Apart from certain fundamental class events - like Hey Day, Feb Club and freshman Econ Scream - much of class programming threatens to confuse tradition with materialism, doling out souvenirs in place of memories.

The second unforgivable is spam, loathed almost as much as rampant Career Services e-mails about zoology internships in Minnesota.

It's hard not to see the spectacle as a publicity machine. The junior class Web site, while increasing visibility, isn't calling for substantial feedback. They want us to submit photos, nominate our favorite juniors and submit our favorite YouTube videos. Next year, they will transform us into future cash cows by sponsoring a Class Gift Drive, which will fuel more shadow spending.

In short, I don't feel like I'm being serviced. Frankly, many events are a waste of money in the pursuit of manufactured traditions. Class Boards add even more social programming on a campus that is already saturated with events.

The answer? I propose we halve the number of positions for each Class Board.

I agree with the idea of student government as a breeding ground for civic spirit. But as it stands, student government threatens to become a training ground not for democratic development but for voter apathy and bureaucratic stupor.

"I don't know what Class Board is," College freshman Dan Morson said. "I don't even know what they do. I have no idea, to be honest."

We're busy people. The 33 elected UA members, plus 40 Class Board positions makes 73 positions in all. With so many people purporting to represent us, how do we manage to elect them all?

We don't. Problems even arise with finding candidates. According to UA member and Wharton junior Liz Lee, "there aren't a lot of people at Penn who want to be on student government, and a lot of people run unopposed."

The solution is simple: Trim the fat. The single most important change we can make to the scaffolding of student government is a cut in the number of elected positions. Otherwise, the structure threatens to become too big, too distant and too unwieldy. Responsibility gets diffused; work gets replicated; the bureaucracy grows, and the paperwork multiples.

So let's eliminate useless sinecures and promote efficiency by hacking at one head of the six-headed hydra that represents student government at Penn.

Elizabeth Song is a College junior from Clemmons, NC. Her e-mail is song@dailypennsylvanian.com. Striking a Chord appears Tuesdays.

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