5/12/10, 1:57 pm

Tags: #ASG #Associated Student Government (ASG) #Bill Banis #Claire Lew #Elise Foley #Mike McGee #Northwestern student government #Northwestern University #NU Administration #Picks #Tommy Smithburg

At ASG’s first meeting last fall, Tommy Smithburg, who played the Al Gore technocrat to then-President Mike McGee’s charismatic Bill Clinton, unveiled a small proposal that underscored a revolutionary idea. The senior wanted to hand control of ASG’s airport ride-sharing and shuttle services over to Northwestern Student Holdings, a private consortium that helps students develop enterprises using NU resources. Smithburg had pushed to create a taxi-sharing network in 2008, before his vice-presidential run. But after another member of Smithburg’s committee suggested adding shuttles on big travel weekends, the venture became too big for ASG, which lacks a bureacracy to implement services, to run. When the shuttles debuted, the senators charged with running them miscalculated demand, losing $250, and later said they were too swamped with other projects to focus on improving them.

Asked what ASG should be, one respondent wrote, “Useful. It’s not. Influential. It’s not. Appealing. It’s certainly not.”

Smithburg quietly began looking for outsiders to run the business, holding meetings where groups like NSH pitched proposals for making the service work. NSH’s plan would maintain the low prices ASG wanted, while maximizing efficiences to keep the shuttle service solvent. Smithburg spoke before ASG and told senators to approve the handover. “We can keep running it ourselves,” Smithburg says he told them. “But NSH would run it better.”

A week later, the senators approved the transfer, but some challenged the decision. There were questions about whether the pricing structure would be thrown out of balance, with prices going up to help offset costs. There were also questions about ASG’s image. Why give up something popular? Smithburg remembers hearing. “It looks so much better for ASG if we’re running the service,” one senator argued.

The senator had a point: Apathy about ASG is rampant. This year, the proportion of students voting in ASG’s presidential election dropped from 52 percent in 2009 to 38 percent. Just 3,200 undergraduates bothered to spend 60 seconds clicking through the online balloting, perhaps because most students feel ASG doesn’t affect them. In an informal survey we conducted last month, about 65 percent of students rated ASG’s impact on their lives as a 1, 2, or 3 on a scale of 1 to 5. Asked what ASG should be, one respondent wrote, “Useful. It’s not. Influential. It’s not. Appealing. It’s certainly not.”

Marathon budgeting sessions in Norris and offbeat conduct rules breed a clubby network of power relationships that strikes outsiders as impenetrable. And lately, those networks have functioned like dynastic ties, with power being handed down one year to the next in return for ideological fealty.

Observers lay the blame on a basket of problems. For one thing, ASG’s fundamental duty remains allocating student activities fee cash to student groups like A&O and FMO. In effect, it’s a giant appropriations committee. At this largely unchanging duty, the body excels. In their capacity as senators, leaders have little direct contact with everyday students. The marathon budgeting sessions in Norris and offbeat conduct rules breed a clubby network of power relationships that strikes outsiders as impenetrable. And lately, those networks have functioned like dynastic ties, with power being handed down one year to the next in return for ideological fealty. Mike McGee, who threw his considerable support to new president Claire Lew, argues that kingmaking allows leaders to push a long-term agenda despite one-year terms. But the result is that most students here haven’t witnessed an ASG president who wasn’t chosen by his or her predecessor. Short terms and no possibility of reelection leave leaders with little time to change anything and little accountability if they don’t. Still, goals that would bring ASG closer to students—developing services like taxi-sharing and focusing on small improvements to student life—have taken a backseat to lobbying efforts (like that alcohol policy we keep hearing about) and blue-sky ideas (like improving diversity).

Yet ASG could be at a turning point. It has new leadership in sharp, politically-minded ASG President Claire Lew and Vice President Hiro Kawashima, who were elected April 14 on a fairly typical ASG candidate platform that urged students to “believe in better.” It will have a larger pool of funds for student groups: ASG lobbied for, and got, an increase in the student activities fee from $138 to $144 next year. That’s $51,000 ASG didn’t have last year—and no powerful group can claim as its own.

It also will have a new position: vice president of services, an addition to the executive board dreamed up by Smithburg and ASG rule keeper Grace Adamson. The position hasn’t been filled yet—the Senate recently passed legislative orders to fill the position within the next six weeks—but if done well it could create more visible answers to the biggest question about ASG: What is it, exactly, that they’re doing?

Students started ASG about 40 years ago, and the organization still seems to be carving out its space—and its role—in the NU’s complex bureaucracy. Traditionally, its powers have been through access (they meet with administrators such as Vice President for Student Affairs William Banis once per week) and money (doling out money from student activities fees to student groups). If administrators seek “student opinion” on an issue, they often look to ASG leaders. If students want something, ASG can help set up meetings with administrators, or lobby them directly. When student groups want funding through the Student Activities Fund, they have to go to ASG to get it–and no one who has sat through a seven-hour funding meeting would argue that students don’t take that power seriously. These powers seem minor, but they do have impact: we have ASG to thank, sometimes indirectly, for weekend intercampus shuttles, wireless in dorms and A&O concerts.

“ASG has been described as an island of democracy in a totalitarian sea,” says Mark Witte, an economics professor who has served as ASG’s faculty adviser for about a decade.

But big issues—the long-term stuff of ASG presidential campaigns—usually get punted year to year, leaving students to wonder what happened to those promises. The McGee-Smithburg campaign, for instance, promised to push for an off campus housing office, an effort ASG progress reports list as 25 percent complete. Issues of effectiveness plague national politics, too. (Where’s that change Barack Obama promised?) Of course, there’s a reason in national politics that we elect presidents and not kings: our system makes change by an individual next to impossible. This is an even bigger problem in student government, where senators and the executive board vow to enact major policy changes, but first have to get past the thorny process of administrative approval. “ASG has been described as an island of democracy in a totalitarian sea,” says Mark Witte, an economics professor who has served as ASG’s faculty adviser for about a decade. ASG can allocate funds, create various student services and bring concerns to the administration. But for the big stuff it has to defer to the big guys, and the big guys don’t always say yes.

To see an unfulfilled campaign promise, just visit Norris. Every year, ASG presidential candidates say they will push for a new student center, and they do—McGee and Smithburg claim to have made significant progress toward the goal. According the 50-year strategic building plan NU released in 2009, Norris will still be with us in 2049. McGee says ASG lobbied to have a revised plan include a new student center, but NU hasn’t unveiled any changes, and the outgoing ASG president says it’s time to focus on the 2011-2020 plan instead. McGee didn’t take a wrecking ball to Norris, and Lew won’t either (her platform notably promised to lobby for change, but not necessarily to get it). “If we had the school budget and I could just wave a wand and say ‘Let’s build a student center,’ I would love that,” Smithburg says.

ASG’s past few presidents have tried to add services, an effort that has not always gone smoothly. “We’re great at lobbying the university, but when it really comes to providing a service, right now we’re pretty bad at it,” Smithburg says. This can be boiled down to a lack of bureaucratic infrastructure—ASG can develop good ideas, but doesn’t always seem capable of implementing them. The services run by ASG would often be left in idle as committee members focused on other projects. “Everyone’s working on five million different things,” Adamson says. The result? Outdated, creaky websites, and some ASG ideas, such as AirHop, being outsourced.

This leads to a credibility gap for ASG. In our “State of ASG” survey, a poll of 82 students, one answered the question “what should ASG be?” with a one word response: “…functional?” Although not all responses were critical, many students wrote that ASG promises too much and delivers too little. “Not only does ASG seem to constantly focus on the irrelevant, they can’t even accomplish that,” one student complains. ASG members should be “more down to earth,” one student says, and “not assholes,” according to another (perhaps related: “Not Pike”). When ranking how well ASG serves their needs on a scale of 1-5, about half of students polled answered “3.” ASG needs to achieve more, or at least have more students recognize its achievements.

The “ASG never does anything” loop can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. “When people don’t think we can do anything, they don’t trust us to do anything and don’t come to us with their concerns,” Smithburg says. Most students who didn’t vote explained their lack of participation with “ASG doesn’t affect me,” meaning that even the most accessible candidates wouldn’t be sought out for help. The lanky, affable McGee says he usually received a few emails per week from students, whom he tried to meet in person or forward to the appropriate ASG committees or administrators. He was always around campus and his email response times—usually Apple product-enabled, if the “Sent from my iPad” signatures indicate anything—are lightning fast. He says instead of writing off ASG, he says students should get involved: “If you feel like it sucks, it’s your responsibility to make it better.”

Some people do join up and try, which is when ASG runs into some institutional problems of its own. Many senators don’t stick around for long, which can be attributed to anything from busy schedules or frustration with Robert’s Rules of Order to senators buying into the “ASG is worthless” mentality. “It’s like coming in and working at a new place and hearing ‘Your organization doesn’t do shit,’ ” McGee says. “That’s tough for someone who really cares and wants to get involved.” Being a four-year senator is uncommon, and even those who are typically do not serve the same constituency for their entire term. Beyond the democratic problems of having elected officials with little concern for reelection, this makes it tough to avoid hitting a reset button with each new year or term. “You really need to be able to trust their track record that they won’t just get elected and coast,” says Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto, a professor of Political Science.

One way to keep ASG accountable is for its functions to be more visible with the ways it’s trying to help students. Most people don’t know that ASG spawned A&O—”ASG doesn’t necessarily have a stamp on all of that, and that’s not the point,” Lew says—but if they did maybe ASG wouldn’t get such a bad rap. Students complain ASG doesn’t impact them, and visible services with an ASG stamp could go a long way in silencing the “ASG is worthless” critics. In a debate the day before she was elected, Lew said she understood this problem. “It’s often a question of ‘What can you do for me?’” she says. “ASG has lots of good answers to those questions, but in terms of communicating that we’ve never done it as well as we could.”

“You really need to be able to trust their track record that they won’t just get elected and coast,” says Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto, a professor of Political Science.

Not that it’s all about giving ASG credit. Adamson and Smithburg say the idea for a position and committee focusing exclusively on not-for-profit services was a hybrid: partly to streamline the scattered ASG service system, partly to offer non-money makers that groups like Northwestern Student Holdings would pass up, and partly to offer opportunities for students to get business experience. The structure they planned up is relatively simple: a committee of “CEO”-type student leaders, each running a different service, overseen by the vice president of services. So far, the committee hasn’t been integrated into the ASG budget, which this year gave $250 per committee for advertising and $7,500 for Senate-run projects.

The question is where the new ASG leadership will focus their efforts. One thing stood out when I asked ASG leaders, past and present, about the functions of ASG. They all said there were three: lobbying, allocating funds and, with one exception, providing services. Lew says ASG should provide advocacy, resources and community—services, she says, are short-term solutions for the long-term lobbying goals.

She’s right: Services shouldn’t be treated like the principle function of ASG. But while they’re lobbying for our student center (McGee promised me he made progress) and doling out our money, making services better and more visible could only help ASG as an institution.

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