The case for returning to a model of shared governance that allows for faculty collaboration and political accountability.
If it wasn’t apparent already, the events of this semester have illustrated that the Student Assembly is defunct. The student-elected body has regular scandals, is infested with ambitious, career-oriented representatives, and can’t seem to attract more than 20% (and most recently, 15.6%) of Cornell students to participate in its elections.
Scandals and Politicking
The Student Assembly routinely embarrasses Cornell with scandals, partisan politics, and corruption. And why shouldn’t they? It’s not as if they could get any more unpopular. Here’s just a few of the latest debacles to come out of Willard Straight.
Outrage erupted at the 2019 Julia Feliz hearings when Joseph Anderson, at the time SA president, shouted down fellow representatives. Notably, Anderson, a white man, screamed at Patience Koku, a member of the public who was from Nigeria, who failed to follow the peculiar American custom of using Feliz’s preferred pronouns.
In February 2020, the SA allocated $5,000 of student funds to throw itself a “gala,” (which ultimately did not happen due to COVID). All undergraduates would have been able to attend. Purportedly, the event would have served the greater student body by demonstrating how to have fun and safe alcohol-free events. Does anything scream “better than thou” more than elected student politicians using student money to show students how to party?
In March 2020, the assembly passed an oh-so-important resolution changing the name of the Women’s Representative-at-Large to “Womxn’s Representative-at-Large.” On behalf of all students, the resolution took the position that “more than two genders exist…more than two sexes exist…[and] sex is an illogic marker of gender.” There is no Men’s or “Mxn’s” representative.
Later in 2020, ten thousand dollars of student money (paid for with the Student Activity Fee) ended up in a BLM campaign bank account. The move violated numerous bylaws, though little was done to correct it.
In Fall 2020, the SA proposed disarming the Cornell University Police Department. A disarmament hearing made national news when then-serving SA President Cat Huang approved a proposal to allow minority students to speak before white students. The disarmament resolution failed–on the first vote, at least. In an act of retribution and brutishly corrupt politicking, SA leadership stripped several opposing representatives from their offices, allowing them to ram through the disarmament resolution on the second try. Subsequently, students engaged in vicious doxing against representatives on both sides of the issue, with some receiving death threats.
Then, in 2021, numerous SA representatives criticized SA President Anuli Ononye’s political maneuverings as breaking protocol and violating the SA bylaws. Ononye used rule quirks to remove a pesky opposition voter from her committee assignment, continuing an ugly habit of punishing dissenters.
Later that same year, SA representatives voted to fund the Cornell Athletics and Physical Education Department, a university-run department, with student money. The department failed to demonstrate a concrete need for the money and reneged on several offers that it made to the Appropriations Committee, yet the proposal was adopted anyway. Ironically, the move increased the Student Activities Fee, despite many candidates campaigning on abolishing the fee.
In December 2022, responding to a series of druggings at fraternity events, the assembly condemned fraternities in Resolution 16, which was so riddled with inaccuracies that President Pollack had to correct them in her response.
In April 2023, the Assembly adopted the now-infamous Resolution 31: Mandating Trigger Warnings, drawing national criticism. Curiously, neither Resolution 16 nor Resolution 31 drew a single vote in opposition from within the Student Assembly, despite being met with tremendous reproach from the greater public. Perhaps SA’s history of persecuting opposition can explain some of the ridiculous yet unanimously-adopted resolutions.
And now the Assembly is in turmoil once again. Just hours after the new Student Assembly was elected, they voted to eject President Pedro Da Silveira, who is allegedly the subject of a pending Title IX case. Members of the SA supposedly knew of the charges against Da Silveira before the election, but waited until after the election to throw him out, making the incident look like a hit job. The whole situation is eerily similar to the 2020-2021 SA election, when presidential candidate Zion Sherin ‘23 was disqualified from the election as the votes were being counted, due to a hotly-contested claim of campaign violations.
Don’t even bother arguing about the presumption of innocence, due process, or voters’ rights to choose their representatives; the Student Assembly has now descended into an all out brawl over what happens next, and has yet to announce who the president will be. The likely contestants seem to be Patrick Keuhl ‘24, the runner up in the presidential election, and Claire Ting ‘24, the newly elected Executive Vice President.
SA as a Resume Booster
Another concern is that student politicians run as an attempt to boost their own resume rather than out of an earnest desire to improve conditions on campus. This leads to performative, trendy resolutions (literally, student government resolution trends often jump from school to school), often having far less to do with campus issues than national politics. Recent examples from the Cornell SA include resolutions:
- Expressing “support for reproductive rights”
- Demanding Cornell support the Black Lives Matter movement
- Condemning ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
- Proposing dissolution of all ties with the Ithaca Police Department (i.e. Defund the Police)
- In support of the incorporation of students’ phonetic name pronunciations and pronouns in all professors’ class rosters
- Standing in solidarity with Uyghur Muslims
- Urging Cornell to further support LGBTQ+ students “after a national wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation”
While some of these are legitimate concerns, these issues stem from national politics, having little-to-nothing to do with Cornell. Some of these resolutions are overt attempts to chill debate by having Cornell come down on one side of an issue. Others have few actionable clauses at all, not that they would be implemented by President Pollack anyway. These resolutions represent the failure of the SA to confine itself to its jurisdiction and demonstrate a comical exercise in virtue signaling.
A cursory glance at the Cornell Assemblies website reveals that the Student Assembly files far more performative resolutions than any of the other assemblies. In 2021-2022 they filed more resolutions total than the other 4 assemblies combined! This term, the 47 resolutions the SA has passed is almost double the combined 26 resolutions passed by all the other assemblies. Does anyone truly believe that the Student Assembly has more important things to legislate on than the University Assembly, the Faculty Senate, the Employee Assembly, and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly?
This is a persistent issue: as early as 1981, the Daily Sun reported then-Trustee Chairman Jansen Noyes as having condemned students for using their positions to “create problems and personal ego trips.” Noyes went so far as to recommend removing student positions from the board.
Legitimacy
The Student Assembly has a massive legitimacy problem. Recent elections for assembly positions have garnered diminishingly small turnouts. The recent election had turnout from 15.6% of the student body. The winner, Pedro Da Silveira, only had support from 822 students, or 5.4% of the student body, in the first round of voting. The previous Student Assembly election had participation from only 10.5% of the student population, with former president Valeria Valencia receiving support from just 862 students, or 5.8% of undergraduates. With support from such a slim portion of the student body, one wonders how the SA can claim to truly represent the views of undergraduates.
The legitimacy issues stem from the very inception of shared governance. In 1971, University President Dale Corson fretted about a New York law requiring at least 40% voter participation for a student trustee election to be considered legitimate. At the time, student trustees were selected by elected student representatives. Corson cautioned that Cornell had “no alternative but to live with the 40 per cent requirement.” Then Trustee Chair Robert B. Purcell clarified that the 40% rule extended to the student body as a whole, saying, “If the student trustees are elected by the student body or by persons who are in turn elected by the student body, then 40 percent must vote. If the [student] senators are not elected by 40 percent of their constituencies, then they are not eligible to elect trustees.”
There’s just no motivation for students to vote in SA elections. It’s not like they really have any choice when electing student representatives, as SA seats are usually uncontested. In the most recent election (2023), only 4 of 18 elections had more than one candidate running, making 78% of the contests “elections” in name only. Further, the runners-up of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential elections are still awarded seats, meaning that only 5 of 25, or 20% of the candidates, were not given a seat in the assembly.
Similarly, in the prior election (2022), only 4 of 16 elections were contested, making ¾ of the elections shoe-ins. Because of the runner up rule for President and Executive Vice President, only 2 of 18 candidates were at any risk for not being elected to the SA. Everyone gets a trophy!
Part of the issue is that there are so many seats and the rules for participation are complicated–in the upcoming election, for example, students can expect to be eligible to vote in at least 13 different contests. Some seats can only be elected by certain segments of the student population, based on school, grade, or transfer status. Other seats–such as Womxn’s Issues Liaison At-Large and Minority Students Liaison At-Large–are nominally reserved for special identity groups. However, these seats cannot be literally restricted to members of such groups due to anti-discrimination law.
It’s all just too much. Besides resenting being lumped into identity groups, students simply don’t have the time to research the eligibility, qualifications, and history of positions and candidates. There’s a reason the only regularly contested positions are the Presidency and Vice Presidency; no one cares enough to think about anything else.
This mind-numbing political process has resulted in a body that is egotistical, unaccountable, and completely out of touch with student views. Representatives speak with the authority of 15,000 undergrads while only capturing the votes of a few hundred, at best.
The Solution
The University should do away with the whole mess and abolish the SA. The SA’s powers could be consolidated in the University Assembly. Perhaps UA’s student representatives could chair a new committee that adopts the SA’s current student-fee-related duties. Without the SA, students would be represented by these student representatives to the UA.
These voting representatives would be more visible than the current army of SA representatives, and therefore more accountable to students. It would be easier for students to follow the actions of a handful of student representatives, who might even become household names. These representatives would be more closely identified with the legislation they sponsor, incentivizing serious and responsible thinking.
Additionally, these representatives would have the guidance of their colleagues: the faculty, employee, and graduate student representatives. The adults would provide a check on the more reckless impulses of the younger Cornellians, perhaps averting embarrassments like the recent trigger warning fiasco.
Abolishing the SA would also simplify the shared governance structure, which is so jumbled that few Cornellians understand it. At present, each stakeholder group–employees, faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students–has its own representative body that controls some funds, can recommend action to President Pollack and reports to the University Assembly, which has representatives from each group.
The result is an elaborate, quinque-cameral (five body) system that leaves constituents with no clue where to look for representation. This division often limits stakeholders’ ability to hold Day Hall accountable. As the Review has noted, many of these assemblies have tried to fix this by passing copycat resolutions in an effort to provoke action from the Administration. Wouldn’t it be simpler if only one body needed to pass a resolution to have it noticed by the administration?
Abolishing the Student Assembly would simplify the legislative process, at least from the perspective of undergraduate students. Perhaps it would even put the university on track to return to a unicameral shared governance body, as existed in the days of the University Senate. With a simpler system, student representatives may finally manage to attract a voter turnout higher than 40%. At the very least, we’d end the endless cycle of scandal.
Agree that we should abolish the Student Assembly? Take our poll here.
This article originally appeared in the Review’s Spring 2023 print edition. The piece has been updated to take recent developments and the Spring 2023 election results into account.
