What I Had To Learn

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One of the most difficult lessons for smart kids to learn is that being smart doesn't always make you right, doesn't mean that you're always the smartest person in the room, and doesn't always make your battles winnable or even important. I spent most of my college years refusing to learn that.

I served on the student council during my sophomore and senior years of undergraduate school, first as the sophomore class representative and then as the senior class representative. This was a small, private school, so we had a small workload, a small budget, and a small amount of responsibility — we shared an otherwise-spare office in the main administration building, for example. Even further, the way to win an election was mostly to sign up. There was little competition for the position, though the 8 am Monday meetings may have had something to do with that.

During my sophomore year, my friend Mike was the freshman representative. Mike and I remain very similar to this day. We had many of the same elective classes, mostly in the music program. When I lived on campus, my dorm was one floor down from his. We're both smart, wickedly sarcastic, and often idealistic to the point of wanting to bend the world in places and ways it would prefer not to bend.

Then we became 18- and 19-year old crusaders.

The previous student council had taken on the imposing task of revising the student body organization's bylaws. My theory is that laws and traditions accrete on groups like procedural barnacles. Every so often it's worth scraping off the accumulation to see what color the boat really was. As far as I recall, the process meant reviewing at least ten years of changes to see what still applied and what had never really worked in the first place.

Whatever actually happened, the dean of students — the faculty advisor to the student council — thought that this was a great accomplishment.

It's not fair to say that I disliked the dean. He was and is a very kind and generous man who identifies very strongly with mature adults (mostly senior citizens) and children. Outside of the academic setting, he is very pleasant. He's a man who will send you an encouraging letter out of the blue praising your strengths and mean it sincerely.

However, neither Mike nor I thought he was effective in student council.

Thinking back now, it must be very difficult to deal with smart 18- and 19-year old college students. On one hand, they are technically adults. On the other hand, the weath of experience they have yet to experience and the maturity they have yet to gain is immense. At that age I had much more potential maturity and wisdom than actual maturity and wisdom and it showed. I didn't want the administration to second-guess my decisions. I didn't want a RA to try to parent me. I would not put up with patronization — either tell me the truth about a rule or remove the rule altogether.

I wasn't entirely wrong in what I believed, but I believed that being right was the end of the war. It's not. It's barely even the first shot in a battle.

The student council year started on bad terms. The elected president left school suddenly to help care for his ill father. We hadn't yet elected a vice president at that point. According to the freshly-revised bylaws, this required a special election to replace the president. There are good points and bad points to that idea, though having a separate election for the president and the rest of student council still doesn't make sense to me, but those were the bylaws.

Instead, the dean appointed the outgoing president as the current president. He was a good president, a good man, and a fairly good friend as well. He's probably an effective leader right now — it runs in his family. Still, the bylaws were clear about the need for a new election.

This wasn't where the trouble started, though.

One of the myriad fees applied to students is a mysterious Student Body Fee. In those days, it was around $60 per semester. From that fee, the student body organization pays certain expenses for various committees. For example, part of the money paid entrance fees into an intramural sports league.

When it came time to discuss the budget, the numbers seemed wrong. In fact, no one really knew how much money we had in the budget. First, we learned that the school administration kept records of the student body organization budget. To issue a payment, either the president or the advisor had to go to the school financial department and sign a check. Yet this department couldn't tell us how much money we had!

First, they estimated that we had about three semesters worth of student body fees in reserve. Fantastic! We could do so many great things with that money — new jerseys for the flag football team (I told you it was a small school), new equipment for the girls' volleyball team, and maybe buying new furniture for the student lounge.

We had several good proposals to consider when the administration revealed that we didn't actually have that money. Worse, we owed the administration that same amount. It's difficult to imagine an accounting structure that can mistake owing for being owed — at least, an accounting department that has stayed in business for more than a year. Things were dubious.

The administration soon made us a generous offer. If the student council voted to spend all three semesters' worth of money that we supposedly owed the administration on new multimedia equipment for teacher use, they would forgive the debt.

There's no way that makes sense to me. If we owed the school money, they would let us borrow the same amount, buy the school equipment that students could not use (though they would benefit from the teachers using it), and the school would forgive the debt?

I suspect, but cannot prove, that the school deliberately mixed the student body organization funds in with the general fund to prop up another department somewhere. I suspect, but cannot prove, that the administration knew this and knew that the school really did owe the student body organization all of this money. I'm still not sure how the logic of borrowing money from the school — going deeper into debt — would help the student body. The only way I can explain it is that the school wanted to spend that money somehow, to take it off of the books, and thought that buying media equipment as a gift from the student body was the best way to do so.

We didn't vote for that. For obvious reasons, it was a terrible proposal. It wasn't good for the students, it probably wasn't legal, and it was crazy.

Actually, I'm not sure that we had a chance to vote on this formally. The dean and the student body president met with the president of the college for several hours and hammered out a deal.

The school, which collected the student body fund fee on the same bill as the tuition and other school-related fees, would give the student body organization a fixed amount of money every semester, starting with the current semester.

The amount of money for the current semester was equivalent to the student body fees for one quarter of our current students. That is, the school collected $60 in student body fees for each student and gave the student body organization $15 of that. Worse, if enrollment went up the next year (and it did), the student council would receive even less per student — they'd fixed the fee at a set dollar amount, not at a set dollar amount per student.

This was too much.

At the time, I made the point to whoever would listen that I didn't really care any more about the missing funds. We'd never have a straight answer on that situation without hiring our own auditor and we didn't even have the money for that. However, collecting money for one purpose on behalf of another organization and using that money for other purposes is dishonest. Anyone who could do simple math could multiply $60 times the rough number of full-time equivalent students and realize that the student council should have had much, much more money available.

In theory, our meetings were open to the public. In practice, no one wanted to be in the administration building at 8 am on Monday mornings. Still, Mike and I invited everyone we could find to attend a meeting one fall day. Several students showed up.

In that meeting, I revealed that, according to the bylaws that the dean loved to discuss as the great accomplishment of the previous year, the student body president was not actually the student body president. We needed to have a special election to elect a new president.

I didn't really think anyone would mind re-electing the president (and I had no designs on it myself). However, the vice president said that he'd just take over, because he was actually in that position now, appoint the appointed president as vice-president, and then resign, putting the now twice-appointed president back in the presidency, leaving him free to appoint the vice president as vice president again.

In the end, nothing changed for the better. We struggled to pay for what we could with our meager allowance. We didn't really accomplish anything. I didn't ruin my relationships with the president or vice president or dean, but I didn't do them any favors either.

The flag football team went without new jerseys. Players had to pay their own fees to enter the intramural league. The girls' volleyball team had to make do with old equipment again. The student lounge used lawn furniture for a while. I am not making this up. At least we didn't make the mistake of buying expensive multimedia equipment and then realizing that we couldn't afford more important things that would have benefited the students more directly.

Mike and I were right. The whole situation was bad. The administration hadn't taken the student council seriously for many years. The bylaws were symbolically important but useless.

The student dean resigned at the end of the next year. His replacement worked much better with students. I skipped a year, but served on student council as a senior. It was much easier then, though we still had severe budget problems thanks to a fixed allowance and a growing student body.

When I graduated, the academic dean took me aside and told me that being right doesn't mean that I'll win. Not all battles are worth fighting. Sometimes it's worth fighting a battle that I know I'll lose, but it's better to choose my battles carefully than to attack every injustice in the world blindly.

Exposing the president's position as illegitimate was a mistake. It made no difference to my arguments. I still believe that the eventual negotiations were terrible and dishonest at best, but with the passage of time, I wonder if focusing on the really important ideas — making sure that we could fund student activities appropriately — would have paid off.

It's embarrassing to think how badly I handled that situation, but it would be worse never to have learned those lessons.