After six members of OU’s Student Union resigned from Student Senate, the Union looks to build power elsewhere.
During the summer, I worked on a committee with two other students from the Ohio University Student Union, three students from Graduate Student Senate and three students from the SOS senate ticket, who are now serving on the Student Senate. We worked tirelessly to create a proposal for a new, directly democratic structure for Student Senate.
There were holes in the proposal, to be sure. However, the current senate’s procedures are also far from perfect. Most serving senators were elected with only slightly more than one-third of the popular vote, and senate recently adopted Robert’s Rules, which, in their rigidity and formality, may seem intimidating to students unfamiliar with the operations of the body.
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The failures of the current mode were not, however, heavily debated during the discussion. Instead, most of the debate centered on minor issues with the direct democracy proposal — issues that could have easily been changed later.
From the beginning I knew the proposal was almost certain to fail in a senate that ran in opposition to the initial proposal for a directly democratic body. However, it was still important to me to try to bridge the gap between the union and the students on the SOS ticket. This is because I believe that a better world is possible — a world in which everyone is involved in making the decisions that affect them. And because I believe this, it is important for me that I am consciously striving to create that world, doing whatever I can in whatever way seems most strategic, even when the chances are slim.
In rejecting the proposal for direct democracy, senate has shown itself to be democratically illegitimate and incapable of fostering an environment conducive to movement building. This is why I, along with the other five Student Union members previously serving on the senate, have chosen to resign. We never wanted to represent students. We wanted to empower students by institutionalizing a union, one capable of building collective power to challenge the university’s current administration and structure.
And we aren’t giving up just because this proposal failed. We are going to continue striving to create the university and world that we want to see. Student Senate is simply no longer a part of the plan, due to the limits of its current structure. For the remainder of the year, I anticipate that Student Senate will remain irrelevant to most students, aside from the occasional free blue book or interesting program. What I hope, however, is that something else emerges, something capable of challenging the structures that exist with a show of force like that which emerged in Quebec three years ago, that which emerged in Paris in 1968, that which emerged here on this campus in 1970. And maybe this time, we will have the tools to win. Maybe this time we will spark a long-term and widespread movement capable of achieving free, democratic and liberatory education — maybe even a free, democratic and liberatory society.
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Two weeks ago, I wrote about the unionization of student workers. Last week, I wrote about the general assemblies that the Student Union is about to begin hosting, the first of which is Thursday, Sept. 17 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in Schoonover 145. These are the tools and strategies to which we now turn, away from the useless bureaucracy of student government and toward the power that we share when we sit in a room together, planning for change.
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Daniel Kington is a sophomore studying English and a Student Union organizer. He is also an officer of the Sierra Student Coalition. Do you think Student Union will create change? Email him at dk982513@ohio.edu.
