With the end of this year’s GM Week comes the death, once again, of the student government political party system. Banned by RNE rules from existing outside of the fall and spring campaign seasons, the political parties like Pygmalion, Demophon, Apollo, and Phoenix are all required to cease operations and official political ties between their members in the "off-seasons."
The problem here is that the continual death and rebirth of political parties on campus prevents continuity, individual expression, and, in effect, promotes and propagates the "popularity contest" corruption of the system.
Imagine, if you will, a system that allows the political parties to exist year-round. Before you balk at the notion of party politics, remember that student government is most certainly not the national government, and I most certainly am not proposing a two-party system similar to the Democrat-Republican relationship. Instead, I propose that parties be allowed to form and die naturally with interest, just as Union clubs do, with an officer system and a set platform of ideals.
Why do this? Simply because it is unreasonable to assume that the students at RPI can be educated enough to choose between anything more than a handful of political beliefs. The problem with party names on the ballots, as our associate copy editor wrote in his Editorial Notebook last week, is that they encourage people to blindly choose a candidate based on party-name recognition. You can solve that problem (at least partially) by having well-established political parties with well-known political stances and party leadership.
If the voting itself isn’t a popularity contest, the party system certainly is—the question is not how many friends you can get to vote for you, but how many friends you can get together to form a party, back you with resources, and help you win the support of important groups on campus.
The system I envision is one more like a parliament, in which there are generally several larger, more stable parties, and lots of little parties with specific, Institute-changing agendas that appear and disappear as big-ticket issues come and go. Yes, I describe the system we have now, except that the parties are not continuous. What do the parties that we have now stand for? No one can answer that because no party hangs on long enough to establish a recognizable identity.
Have RNE regulate them and their activities, yes, but do not squelch them. Allow the members of student government bodies to outwardly express their political alliances rather than closeting them in intrigue and closed-door whispering. Give students the ability to express themselves and their political views year-round rather than pretending that we have no ideological differences. The next step towards improving student government is to stop deluding ourselves and give parties the chance to live.
