Eva Ahn

Student government is a kind of a fifth class. Having finished my work with Bowdoin Student Government (BSG), I thought I should write a sort of course review: what worked, what didn’t and how we can improve the institution in the future.

This year’s government was broadly successful. We transported hundreds of students to the Portland Jetport in a first-of-its-kind free break shuttle. We adopted a new constitution, permitting easier removal of student government officials by a school-wide vote and ensured our rules matched day-to-day operations. Finally, we moved Saturday Ivies back to Bruns Quad, lobbying to restore the event to the pre-Covid-19 tradition.

Though I am proud of our achievements, I believe we can do better. Our candidates, including me, have promised transparency in their campaigns but struggle to inform students while in office about who we are, what we do and how we do it. We fail not because we are incompetent but because the communication and outreach that create transparency require a time commitment. Instead of focusing on student engagement, our most visible members are occupied keeping track of our committees, learning how we work and finding times to meet with administrators. In other words, we have a busy work problem.

Our student government must do away with the parts of our structure and culture that create busy work: We must shrink our membership, build a base of experienced student members and assert our independence from Bowdoin administrators.

The BSG’s immense size requires intense upkeep. We have around 50 total members working on faculty committees, class councils, our General Assembly and our Treasury. That corresponds to a ratio of about 30 students per BSG member. If the federal government was proportionally large, it would employ roughly 11 million Americans. The actual federal government has three million employees. A student government’s size should reflect this difference in responsibility.

Though our size can be an asset, it often only inflates the cost of coordination. For example, getting our assembly members and our faculty committee delegates to push the same agenda is nearly impossible without dozens of hours of emailing. This cost could be discounted by simply merging these easier roles. Worse yet, our government spends dozens of hours each year simply keeping our large membership full—running elections, filling vacant positions and taking attendance—when we could be serving students.

Furthermore, our student government consistently lacks experience. This year, only one member of the Executive Board—the group in charge of administering our government—was a returning Board member. We had to learn how to send school-wide emails. We emailed in circles to get key access to the Mills Hall event space. We spent weeks figuring out how to get speakers for Ivies. Experienced leadership would not waste the same amount of time.

Most importantly, the BSG must be unafraid to publicly defy or fight Bowdoin administration when we have strong student support. We frequently have long-winded, private back-and-forths about student life that ultimately lead to little change. Sometimes, we should pull out of negotiations and pursue solutions without the school’s involvement. If the faculty chooses not to publish syllabi before course registration, we should encourage students to share the syllabi’s most relevant information on Bowdoin Course Reviews. Other times, we would be better off taking our advocacy public. Take Bowdoin’s construction of the new Arctic Museum as an example. Private discussion with administrators would not demonstrate to the Board of Trustees that those ten million dollars would be better spent hiring more organic chemistry or math professors.

We have addressed some parts of our busy work problem this year. Our new constitution explicitly limits the size of the General Assembly, simplifies the election process and directly clarifies appointment procedures. Many of next year’s Executive Board are returning members, too, allowing work to start as soon as we return to campus in the fall.

Future BSGs must focus sharply on cutting busy work. Only when our members dedicate time to transparency will the student government be transparent. It is a matter of giving our members that time.

Elliott Ewell is a member of the Class of 2027 and BSG Vice President for the 2024-2025 academic year.