Musings on On Self Governance
Most Grinnell students consider self governance
(or self gov
) a core
aspect of a Grinnell education. Many faculty members and administrators
also consider it essential to a Grinnell education. So, what is self gov,
and what effects does it have at Grinnell? Amazingly, no two people
seem to completely agree, which is one of the reasons our task force on
residential life is considering the meaning of self gov and is recommending
that we develop a clear(er) statement on self gov.
But that won’t stop me from giving my own opinion.
At its core, self gov is the concept that we, as an institution, allow Grinnell students to take responsibility for themselves, both individually and as a community. Ideally, that responsibility requires real responsibility, as it were. That is, students must think about the effects of their actions on others, they must consider how they can support their peers (even as those peers may make bad choices), and they must work together to govern their communities.
When self gov works right, it does many things well. It helps our students be part of a real community. It empowers them to lead. It prepares them to be citizens in a broader community. It causes them to reflect on what responsibility means.
Self gov certainly shows itself in many practices on campus, from small
to large. Self gov is core to the residential experience. For example,
students collaborate to decide whether their bathrooms should be for one
sex (gender?) or gender neutral. Students who see friends in trouble
because of drugs or alcohol know that they have a responsibility to
support them and are generally not afraid to get adult
help because
we do not punish the reporting students.
Self gov also influences how students act in the broader academic community. I was recently at a speech for prospective students at Macalester, and the president mentioned the awesome startup weekend that they’d just held. At Grinnell, we also have awesome startup weekends. However, those are designed and run by students, rather than by the administration. When Grinnell hosted TEDx, it was because students pushed for it and ran it. I see this initiative and willingness to pursue interesting tasks in so many things that our students do, and the campus support for student initiative is grounded in self gov. Some colleagues who have been at both Grinnell and peer institutions say that our students are much more involved in the overall governance of the College (even though it may not feel like it to our students).
Does that mean that self gov is perfect? No, far from it. The campus bike program was clear evidence of a failure of self governance. Students did not take care of the shared bikes. Some would jump off of them while still in motion and allow them to crash. Others would drive unsafe bikes, putting both themselves and others at risk. Neither kind of action is evidence of students taking on responsibility for themselves and others.
Grinnell’s alcohol and drug culture also shows some failures of self
gov. While I appreciate how our students help each other, the student
community, as a whole, has not taken sufficient steps to address the
problems with alcohol abuse on campus. In part, that’s because too many
students seem to think that self gov means I can do what I want without
fear of penalty
, rather than I have a responsibility to govern myself
as part of a community
.
Students are saying that self gov is dead
. But they’ve been saying
that as long as I’ve been at Grinnell. I would say that self gov is
less healthy than it’s been at some times. Two forces clearly threaten
self gov: First, the students who misunderstand self gov and consider
it license to do what they want; Second, the administrators who react
to those failings with additional rules and regulations. What can
we do? Principles of self governance would suggest that students would
teach each other about their responsibilities and, in doing so, they
would reveal to the less optimistic administrators that self gov can
be successful.
Will that happen? I hope so. Will we have some rules that impinge upon self gov in the mean time? It looks like it. But will we continue to empower students to govern themselves in a wide variety of situations? I expect so.
Ideally, I would have drawn on a wide variety of documents in writing this essay, including the new report from the task force on residential learning. However, it’s finals week, and this is intended more as a rough musing than a careful analysis. Perhaps I’ll return to a more in-depth version in a month or two.
Version 1.0 of 2016-05-16.