THE INMATES run the asylum at the University. Self-governance is a source of institutional pride and provides invaluable experience to students. But there is a dark side to student self-governance. It is the urge to ignore merit and to elevate cliques. Every year it seems like student self-governance is more about who you know than what you've done.
When I was a first year in the fall of 1993, self-governance seemed like a wonderful exercise in Jeffersonian democracy. High school activities were about pleasing faculty advisors and not insulting the principal. But at the University the advisors were gone and the principal didn't know your name. There was real responsibility to be had, and opportunities to get involved everywhere you looked. For a Type A personality, it was like being at a Las Vegas buffet table.
It didn't take long to figure out that this picture of student self-governance was not exactly accurate. Sure there were plenty of organizations and activities to go around, but if you wanted to participate in the heart and soul of self-governance you needed to know people. If you wanted to be a politico it didn't matter how smart you were or how even how eager, it was about drinking with the right upperclassmen.
For the most part, the keys to the politico kingdom went through the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society and the University Guide Service. If you wanted to be on the Honor Committee you tried to join the Jefferson Society. If you wanted a sure shot at living on the Lawn, you tried to become a Guide. Obviously some things have not changed much in the last seven years.
The mother of all exclusivity is the Lawn selection process. The opportunity to live on the Lawn is supposed to reward those fourth years who have contributed to the University community. But every year it seems less about achievement, and more about who has friends on the selection committee.
And above all the process rewards mediocrity. Rocking the boat or taking tough stands is not prized by the selection process. If you are a Guide, tutor at Madison House, and generally drink with the right politico fourth years, you are a shoe in. But if you are Editor-in-Chief of The Cavalier Daily and give thousands of hours of your life to the University community, there is no room for you.
Perhaps the most hypocritical of the honor societies is the Raven Society. Here is an organization supposedly dedicated to recognizing the most academically gifted and motivated students at the University. But in my seven years as a student I have lost count of the number of Phi Beta Kappa members who were rejected by the Raven Society. One such student had to win a Rhodes Scholarship before the Ravens would consider him for membership. In recent semesters the Raven selection process has become a vehicle for exacting revenge on ex-boyfriends and for imagined slights.
The University has institutionalized this who-do-you-know atmosphere. Take the Government Honors program for example. Billed as a seminar for the best and the brightest of government majors, the Honors program is really nothing more than a two year vacation for Type A overachievers. They have their GPAs fixed and only have to take a handful of audits over their third and fourth years. All in return for a less than ambitious thesis and weekly papers that the students don't exactly take seriously. The program is supposed to be open to every government major, but talk to professors or alumni of the program and they will tell you otherwise. Government Honors is about kissing up to the right professors, and drinking with upperclassmen in the program. And joining the Jefferson Society doesn't hurt.
It is easy to see how many members of the University community feel shut out and underrepresented in student self-government. It is not hard to understand why they see the honor system as unfair or the Lawn as unreflective of the institution as a whole. The track for honors and achievement at the University starts early, and it hardly is inclusive. Certainly there are many of us, myself included, who benefited from this track. But there was always room for people who weren't part of the crowd. Over my seven years here I have seen student self-selection become more pervasive and more malicious. But what do you expect when the inmates are running the asylum?
(Sam Waxman's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily.)
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