Pras Subedi
Contributing Writer
I’ve served in Scot Council, the College of Wooster’s student government, for over a year now. I’ve served as a Sexuality and Gender Diversity Representative, and more recently, in the capacity of chairing the Social Justice and Equity Committee. This committee is Scot Council’s subcommittee that is supposed to engage with social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion issues on campus. While a lot of the work I’ve done for Scot Council has been transparent and visible, most of it is lost to the broader audience and stuck in the backend. I can no longer continue to hold this role, and I think students deserve to know why.
First, the workload of Scot Council is not compensated for, financially or otherwise. As a student who is overloading academic courses, working several jobs and running multiple student organizations on campus, the additional work that comes with being in student government is beyond stressful — and, I cannot stress this enough, not compensated. An argument leveled against this is that it is a voluntary role to make the campus a better place, and the compensation for the role is the validation of being able to do this. This argument relies on the presumption — which many in this school have — of students needing to do free labor for the school, a presumption that falls apart when any scrutiny is applied.
Secondly, the structure of Scot Council has little care for marginalized and minoritized groups. This is not just because most of the marginalized students here are overextended and over exhausted, but because Scot Council is designed to tokenize minoritized students through the Constituency Representative role while offering them no real agency or support. The Sexuality and Gender Diversity role is not elected by queer, trans and gender nonconforming students, nor is the Racial and Ethnic Diversity role elected by students of color. The International Students Diversity role is not elected by international students and global nomads, and so on. We aren’t empowering constituencies to choose their own representatives; instead, we’re asking the whole school who should be tokenized for each identity category.
Beyond that, this diversity does very little as the lived experiences, grievances and intellectual ideas brought in by these minoritized students aren’t engaged with. The structure of Scot Council serves to tokenize, co-opt, sanitize, destabilize and disengage the ideas brought forth by marginalized and minoritized students.
Finally, Scot Council is powerless and forced to be silent. This college is going down a dangerous path of stifling free expression and silencing progressive voices. In an earlier Viewpoint, I pressed my concerns on the President villainizing protestors using offensive stereotypes of “bullying.” If that wasn’t enough, now the school is pushing guidelines to have students be required to meet with them before protests. This defeats the point of protests entirely by taking any shock value from them, serves as a surveillance mechanism, discourages protests through bureaucratic hurdles and stops the possibility of spontaneous demonstrations.
Furthermore, the school announced privately to faculty and staff that they no longer have access to send messages through the ZWD-student lists, which is alarming and beckons the question of why the administration is so intent on blocking free speech. As the administration clamps down on freedom of expression, Scot Council has been unable to stop these dangerous precedents being set because there are no mechanisms for Scot Council either to vote to pass a resolution or to hold a referendum condemning these attacks on free speech.
I want to press upon every reader that my grievances aren’t with members of the Scot Council, most of whom are amazing student leaders who do not get enough praise for what they do, but with how Scot Council is structured and designed.
I hope that the structure of Scot Council is completely reconstructed from the bottom-up. First, Scot Council needs to go beyond just tokenization of minoritized groups. They must move towards actual engagement with them as intellectual equals and not just sources of complaints and grievances. It also needs to move to providing some form of compensation for student leaders who wish to engage with Scot Council. Most importantly, its structure needs to be changed to hold the school accountable with mechanisms on passing resolutions or calling for student referenda, which, even if they’re non-binding, send clear messages to the administration.