After carefully reading through the constitution that we used back then, I initiated a lawsuit against the General Assembly (which if you know, you know, I can't even begin to explain it here) the "legislative body" of the Wilf Campus Student Government apparatus. The GA has the power to do open meetings to allow students to be aware of what they are planning. There hasn't really been a true open meeting since 2006, which was the last such meeting that the Commentator reported on.
I first thought I could force them to do it by trying them in Student Court. I was naive, but I prepared my case and tried to initiate a case. Unfortunately, my grandmother died while I was in the middle of the whole thing, and I really didn't want to keep up the fight while I was trying to mourn her, so I dropped the case. Which, in retrospect was probably for the better.
I was not the only person frustrated with the situation. Baruch Lerman, one of the rare students who spends four years at YU, a career politician in student government wanted to completely restructure the whole enterprise.
So he assembled a constitutional committee to make a new constitution. I was invited to join, and I happily participated in the discussions. I read up on Roberts Rules of Order and offered my research abilities to analyze how student government behaved in the past.
Our whole committee was rather unprofessionally run. We didn't actually produce a document for people to look at until the very last second, and in order for any legislation to pass it needs to go through a review process for the constituents to read it. Of course the document didn't even get a majority of votes cast.
Internally, within the committee, we entered into a state of group think, where we just assumed that all the problems of student government were caused by the vague, unclear, and powerless rules that filled the existing constitution. If we could only make a constitution that clearly outlined a better organization that was filled with competent students, we could actually improve things. We could return autonomy to the students. There was discussion of returning students to the calendar committee so that we could have a say in the calendar so that it wouldn't be so inconvenient for us. We could present a united front of student advocacy and really make change. We could restore student control over the Student Union space in the Schottenstein Center and bring about a renaissance of student activities that people would actually attend.
We were all living in a fantasy that these rules could somehow fix all of our problems. Now, I had some doubts that I would occasionally bring up in meetings. Will these rules really fix everything? Do we need to do an overhaul of this system to fix many of these problems? Even if we do get this whole thing passed, how will people know how to use it properly? Our ideas were not new. An older and more professionally run constitutional committee in 2001 successfully overhauled their constitution and it didn't really solve any problems.
When our vote failed, some members of the group were angry that the students didn't listen to us. But I tried to talk sense into them, that it would make us all look like pieces of shit of we didn't take this lose graciously. The loss sent down a path of introspection. I reread some of the historical sources on student government. I tried to get a better understanding of the theory behind why it exists and how it exists. The more a rethought, outside of the eco-chamber of the constitutional committee, the more I was convinced that we students don't currently have the power and crucially never had the power to independently run student government.
A much more lengthy treatment of this subject is necessary to hammer down all the details of the issue of student government at YU, but I want to summarize it as best as I can here.
Though we do find instances of students independently advocating for themselves in 1905 through 1908 during the years of turmoil in the early yeshiva, I find it unlikely that those primitive strike organizations formed the foundation of the school's oldest student council, the Student Organization of Yeshiva, or SOY.
The earliest written record I have been able to find of it comes from the 1923 Talmudical Academy yearbook, which mentions the lag ba'Omer baseball game between the Yeshiva and the Talmudical Academy. The Students' Organization of the Yeshiva (SOY) and the Students' Organization of the Talmudical Academy High School (SOTAHS) arranged the annual baseball game.
From then on we have the Hedenu newspaper that SOY published. Here we see their Hebrew name, הסתדרות תלמידי ישיבת ר׳ יצחק אלחנן. In the fact the first issue of the paper from May 1926 has an editorial from the president of SOY, Shlomo Wind (who would go on to teach at TI and Stern for many years) begging students to get more involved in the organization and to support it. Sounds a little familiar. It becomes immediately apparent that students at YU have never been entirely enthusiastic about student government type activities. We don't know exactly how this institution of SOY came to be.
In addition to these early records of the SOY we also have writing from the Students' Organization of the Teachers Institute, הסתדרות תלמידי בית מדרש למורים. They published a yearbook called Nir, entirely in Hebrew. Once again we don't know exactly when the organization was formed, but both for SOY and SOTI, they needed to have been around for a bit to become established enough to publish their own magazines. There's no mention in these publications of the founding of the Students' Organization, everyone who's around just seems to assume it exists and doesn't feel the need to question it or be proud of its growth since its founding.
I suspect that these organizations were created in shortly after 1915, when RIETS started to professionalize into an American seminary. It maintained its Yeshiva elements with Sedarim and Shiur on Talmud and Halacha, but it also incorporated classes on academic Jewish studies, language, and homiletics. Once the Teachers Institute was added in 1917, they started teaching pedagogy. The school was working to being professional. There is a longstanding practice of American schools having student governments to organize activities to keep up the spirits of the students while they engage in their studies.
These institutions are intended to benefit the school, by ensuring there will be such activities to entertain the students and build comradery between then, and the students get to practice leadership skills in a controlled environment before they enter the real world.
It seems fairly likely that the school actively decided to adopt such a policy around 1915 to 1917ish, maybe a little later. That policy has not changed. The students are given a little funding from the school to arrange activities. They have to abide by the guidelines of the school's administration.
When Yeshiva College was created in 1928, the school was quick to form its own Students' Organization of Yeshiva College or SOYC. Its similarity to SOY made then change the title after a year to be the Yeshiva College Student Council or YCSC. The student council answered to the dean of Yeshiva College. This arrangement was similar to how the SOTI worked with the dean of TI. These deans were able to arrange for meeting space for their school's student councils. They encouraged students to work with the faculty of the college to do academically oriented student activities. In the early years, the student council worked with the Yeshiva College librarians to purchase the textbooks needed for the courses being taught each year. The council even diverted some of its funding to that.
The YCSC, like all the other student councils likely worked closely with the deans of Yeshiva College, or the school it served, and the faculty of the school to accomplish its programing. YCSC organized athletic and intellectual competitions both within and outside of the school. They brought in guest speakers to talk about politics and intellectual pursuits, and paid for fun social events for people to just hang out in.
We know that YCSC's relationship with the faculty was instrumental to its success, since it was one of the complaints they lodged against the dean of Yeshiva College, Dr. Shelly R. Safir, in 1936. During the very early years of the school, the Student Council directly collected the activity fee and managed its own banking. However fairly quickly, the activity fee collection was handled by the office of the Bursar (financial office.)
The bursar then had to appropriate the money to the student council in order for them to spend it. I speculate that the process began with YCSC drafting a budget. This budget would plan out how their money for that particular semester would be spent. X amount would go to subsidizing the Commentator, X amount to the Yearbook committee, X amount to the chess club, and so on. The budget probably had to be approved by the dean of Yeshiva College before the bursar could authorize the funds.
This whole process meant that the students had to pass a budget before anything could be done that semester, but it also meant that the students were the one's who directly spent the money on events.
Even as far back as the 1940s, the school was trying to slowly professionalize its student services. Such as the career placement center, its dormitories, and health services. They created a position in the 1950s called the dean of men who supervised the men's housing and the dean of women who supervised women's housing. The dean of men/women and the deans of Yeshiv/Stern college worked with their respective student governments jointly. We can find an example of a training session these two deans did for the Stern College for Women Student Council during the early years of the school.
The dean of the college still held the veto power for student activities during this era. A good example of this being exercised, was when Dean Isaac Bacon of Yeshiva College blocked the formation of a Student run radio station for several years until he was able to work out an agreeable arrangement with the Student Council in 1968.
By the mid-1980s, the office of the dean of students was being solidified. The responsibilities of events planning were shifted away from the dean of the colleges and onto the dean of students. Since the dean of students office was created, the functional autonomy of the student government has decreased slowly over time.
I suspect that this loss of power directly translates to a frenzy of amendments to the constitution and even rewriting the whole document in an effort to reclaim control. Students don't really realize that the policy of the school has changed since previous generations, and they believe that the constitution is a respected document. If only the could change it, things would get better. So we see that the SCWSC produced a new constitution for itself in 1996 that clearly outlined how the treasurer of the council would do the banking. I speculate that this reflects a reality where student council was losing the ability to do its own banking, and they were trying to keep it by putting it into writing.
The Yeshiva College Student Council saw over 30 amendments passed over the 1990s leading up to an overhaul of the whole student council system in 2001 that combined all the small student councils in a large Student Union body.
Very quickly, the original student council basically separated again, and its unlikely that they ever functioned as the unified body that the framers intended. The 2014 amendments, made this arrangement official.
By 2004 the Dean of Student had organized the Office of Student Affairs that managed student activities. Its hard to say the extent of the office's control of the process of event planning. We know that the Commentator was still doing its own banking during this period, but the YSU was less vocal about its plans to do things. Long gone were the days when the Student Council would draft a budget in the first few weeks of the semester. The YSU still did an opening meeting that mimicked the budget, but they were just taking suggestions for things to do, the meeting was under no obligation to produce an actionable budget.
By 2011, the Office of Student Affairs was subdivided again, and the Office of Student Life was formed to specifically focus on managing events. At least five full time employees were devoted to this cause. The office produced a policy sheet directed at student leaders to explain how the office worked. No longer were students allowed to independently spend student activity money. Every single purchase was managed through the Office of Student Life. This intricate involvement of every step in the process of event planning meant that the office recommended you submit all the details of your event three weeks in advance to allow for everything to be cleared and managed by the office.
Both the Commentator and the Observer changed their website domains from .com to .org around this time. We know from some issues that recently arose regarding both domains, that OSL makes the payments to maintain the domains, and nowadays OSL also manages the banking of both papers. I suspect that this change in domain was due to an OSL policy that wanted to control all the spending of student activity money.
Oddly enough, the Seforim Sale was given immunity to the control of OSL. The seforim sale operates like an old school student organization, with more autonomy than anything else. I don't know why that is exactly, but perhaps someone high up enough in the YU administration knew that forcing the Seforim Sale to comply with OSL regulations would cripple it and destroy it.
Under the current system, one has to wonder, what is the place of elected student officials. In the early days of OSL, the office actually directly managed the election, but they quickly saw how dicey counting ballots can be and quickly stepped out of it. So the students independently run an election and then OSL recognizes whomever the election committee declares the winner. There are so many rules in the election that are so specific that every year there's been some kind of court case to settle who actually won the election due to issues of eligibility to have that seat in student government.
OSL wants to cater to the interests of the students, but they also have to follow university policy and will limit what student leaders can do. Our current imagination of the all the positions in student government is based on a time when OSL didn't exist and student government actually needed to manage things.
I don't really know what the answer is, but I do know that our current constitutions assume that students are doing a lot more than they actually are in these elected positions.
The constitutions did not always need to exist. In fact the early student governments didn't have one. They likely just functioned off of the policies set forth by the deans of the schools that created them. These constitutions mimicked those policies when they were eventually drafted, but the secrecy of what actually is policy at YU nowadays means that so much of the constitution might not actually be policy. Which discredits its legitimacy as a document.
With all that considered, I propose that the Office of Student Life and the Dean of Students publish their policies. They can update them as often they like. They don't have to be accountable to the students, but the policies have to be open for us to see.
The policies should include info about the limitations of what activities can be, like no alcohol and sex. They should include limitations on who can be student leaders, such as whether or not a student's standing with the registrar should affect their eligibility to be part of things.
Once we know what the limitations of student autonomy within activities is, we can work with OSL to draft a set of by-laws that actually reflect the political reality of the school and allow for more natural and seamless collaboration between students, faculty and administrators.
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