student government

5 broken approaches to U.S. student organizing, and why we need real movement infrastructure to build real student power

While each campus' particular iteration is different, student government culture is surprisingly consistent across the country. Disdain, in one form or another, for their fellow students can be found among SGA members at universities big and small.

When an organization's bureaucracy has become calcified and disconnected from its members over the years, thanks to guaranteed revenue, removal of that guarantee can be a death sentence. Grassroots, direct democracy is like a muscle — when a union all of a sudden faces Right-to-Work, or when a student association has its dues frozen by administrators, we see that muscle has atrophied so much that the organizations often collapse under their own weight.

by Ray Glass:
"In this article I have outlined the problems with student governments, their failure to adequately represent and further the interests of students, the need to develop a new organizational form to serve this purpose, and some of the principles on which that new type of organization should be based. I have defined the problems according to Bundy's watershed theory because student governments have passed their second watershed..."

Most student governments with large enough budgets pay their members - usually executive positions, but sometimes members of the student legislature are compensated too. Their stated purpose is foremost explained as a way to make sure working class students aren't shut out of student government roles. Stipend use is an easy fix, and as with most easy fixes, it's also a shoddy one.