Image sourced from the Student Government Association webpage.
This article is published under the Opinions Section of The Skidmore News.
On Monday afternoon, November 8th, Skidmore’s Student Government Association (SGA) announced the results of the Fall 2021 SGA election. The election brought in a slew of new First-Year representatives and other residence positions. Voting occurred online via SkidSync, the Skidmore community’s website for clubs and co-curricular activities.
The results email from SGA reported that the total number of Skidmore students who voted in the election was 112 (out of approximately 2,600 students). This is about four percent of the student body who voted in the election of our next group of Student Government representatives. Quite frankly, this stands out as an embarrassingly and frustratingly low number. For a student body that talks constantly about institutional and administrative change, low election turnout represents a serious lack of follow-through on that front. I find it unrealistic for there to be any widespread institutional change at Skidmore without the help of SGA.
For comparison, I was gratefully provided SGA election voter turnouts in recent years. In the Fall of 2019, 359 students (~13.8 percent) voted in the SGA election. One year later, in Fall 2020, that number dropped to 270 (~10.4 percent).
However, Skidmore students do have the potential to turnout in big numbers: the Spring 2020 Special Election had a whopping 815 voters (~31.3 percent), and the Spring of 2021 still had 434 (~16.7 percent). There is a history of active voter engagement on campus and it must be quickly repaired.
After talking to Skidmore students following the election, it was clear that very few people knew that the election even happened. This is equally as frightening as, and probably explains, the low turnout. I looked back in my email, and could only find a few emails about the entire process: one about self-nominations, one about speech night, with information about the election at the bottom, and then a results email. In other words, if you were to miss the speech night email, or quickly swiped it away because you weren’t interested in the speeches, there wasn’t another mass communication about the election date and how to vote.
Additionally, the SGA Instagram page posted the candidates’ posters on a Highlight (a feature where you can save multiple stories to your profile as a collection), but like some of the other methods, that was only there for a student to seek out on their own. I knew the election was open because I happen to follow a candidate who posted about it on their personal Instagram page.
At this point, it could be said that both sides should have done better. But, it would be unfair to put much of the onus on SGA, as the low turnout was ultimately because students simply did not vote. Claims of not knowing about the election are legitimate, but there were other ways for students to hear of it. For example, I am sure many students saw news of it on Instagram, as I did. Those students, as well as friends of the candidates themselves, probably made up a majority of those who voted. The voters in this election, therefore, were generally very concentrated in a certain group of students at Skidmore. For these many reasons, the voices that went into the new SGA’s construction are not representative of the entire Skidmore student body.
As a small college with just around 2,600 students, Skidmore’s governing structure is comparable to that of a small town. SGA’s Student Senate, the “primary legislative body” at Skidmore, “creates and recommends policies that relate to student life on campus, charters new clubs and organizations, authorizes the allocation of the Student Activity fee to clubs and other various student-run organizations and appoints students to committees run by faculty and administrators” (language taken from SGA Senate page).
Students elected to the Senate have direct communication with the administration and direct influence on policies. Senate representatives are participants on various committees, such as the Institutional Policy and Planning Committee (IPPC), which oversees “budget and finance, benefits, student affairs, admissions, advancement, and special programs” at Skidmore. SGA representatives have been vital actors in creating college-wide mechanisms like the Summer Experience Fund, which gives stipends to students with unpaid summer internships. SGA is also the institution responsible for confirming and funding the creation of new clubs on campus, and the host of many popular events for the student body.
Regularly voting in SGA elections is the most effective way to hold our student representatives accountable. This means ensuring that representatives’ campaign promises are being upheld, and that policies benefiting the student body are being implemented. It is a common argument in the study of electoral politics that if you are eligible to vote, and you actively decide not to, your critiques of your representatives are automatically less valid, because you chose not to use the mechanisms in place for voicing those complaints. This sentiment applies to Skidmore’s SGA on an even more concentrated level. For all of the administration’s seeming ineptness, we have a legitimate institution on this campus, led by students, that is equipped and willing to act on students’ demands. We need to take advantage of that.
All hope is not lost. Government work is continuous, which means we have plentiful opportunities to strengthen the relationship between the student body and SGA. SGA Senate meetings occur every Tuesday night in Ladd 307 at 8:00 P.M. and are open to the public. Also, Senate and committee meeting minutes are available to the Skidmore community on SkidSync, for those who wish to see how SGA functions behind the scenes.
One of the things I appreciate most about students at Skidmore is how passionate we are about seeing change in our institutions and administration. Especially now, with calls for reforms in Sexual and Gender-Based Misconduct (SGBM), SGA is a body that needs our full support. They are the students with the most influence in the higher administration and without them, it is far less likely that there is sufficient student opinion in the creation of new policies. I as a student know that these policies all affect us on a deep, personal level, and can affect some on a deeper level than I can even imagine. Community participation in SGA is one of the few assured ways that institutional change can be made with definitive cooperation with the student body. Being involved and supportive of SGA means, first and foremost, voting in elections, but it also requires voicing students’ opinions to SGA, so they know how to work with the administration to best benefit the entire student body.
There are various ways to get involved in Student Government. As mentioned, weekly Senate meetings are open to the public. SGA also recommends reaching out to its executive members: SGA President, Geraldine Santoso ‘22, can be reached at gsantoso@skidmore.edu; Executive Vice President Nathaniel Lowell, ‘22, nlowell@skidmore.edu. The contact information for the rest of the Executive Committee can be found on the SGA page. Finally, there are currently vacant seats in the Student Senate.These will be filled through the “Willingness to Serve” process, which can be found on the Office of Leadership Activities on SkidSync.
I would like to give a huge thank you to SGA Executive VP Nathanial Lowell ‘24, who provided me with the contextual info on SGA for this article.