In print | Published April 14, 2005

As much as it may feel like we’re jumping on a bandwagon when we say it, we, along with Student Council and many students, are coming to view the Social Affairs Committee’s work this year as a disappointment.

With all the obligations students have, it’s always been difficult to keep Swarthmore’s social calendar full, but this year stands out as one where there have been far too many nights where the only weekend events were lackluster, cookie-cutter Paces or frat parties. We’ve been distressed by the growing degree to which SAC seems to have come to see itself as only a subdivision of SBC responsible for passively reviewing and approving students’ applications for funding.

Looking at their description on the Student Council Web site, which claims that SAC is “responsible for providing a balanced social calendar every weekend,” we have to disagree with this interpretation.

Whether or not SAC has historically had the role of actively initiating proposals for parties and directly encouraging new and creative ideas from students, it’s a job that some on-campus group really should be doing, and SAC is in the right place to do it. If current SAC members don’t feel up to the task of doing so, that’s a reason to appoint a different set of students next time around. Student Council has already taken a decisive step to change the way Orientation Week happens by appointing a different composition of students to the Orientation Committee — surely the whole school year’s social calendar is as important as Orientation Week.

What we find most disturbing is that this year SAC has not only failed to directly encourage new and exciting ideas for social events but has acted to actively discourage them. When the Swarthmore Voter Registration Coalition held the all-campus viewing of the presidential debates on Parrish Beach — the first truly unique and interesting student-organized social event in quite some time — SAC refused to fund it in order to uphold their interpretation of their bylaw against funding events with a “political or social agenda,” which could only apply to holding a general viewing of the debates if interpreted as broadly as possible.

When they faced very strong student support for the idea of making the debate showings a SAC-funded event, from below as well as from above in Student Council, rather than choosing to change their interpretation of the bylaw or take steps to change the bylaw, they took a hostile attitude toward SVRC and SC and actually protested SC’s overriding their decision.

Along the same lines, SAC has recently encountered justified criticism of a longstanding policy of giving favored positions to certain parties simply because those parties are traditionally held by the same groups at the same time every year and have historically been “successful.” When this historical success is the justification for giving the parties extra funding and a monopoly on the social calendar that weekend, such success becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Privileging certain parties that have no distinguishing characteristics besides past success — to the point of denying students the choice to attend another SAC-funded event that weekend — is favoritism, plain and simple. We shouldn’t tolerate it.

Of course, SAC itself may have been bound by past tradition in this regard, but that doesn’t explain why SAC’s current leadership chose to protest SBC’s decision to take away Heaven and Hell and the SOCA/Enlace party’s privileged status. SAC appears not only to be hidebound by habit and tradition but to have become an actively conservative force, resisting and protesting all externally imposed changes on the way they operate. On a campus where most people agree the social calendar has grown boring and stagnant, this is a bad thing.

We may be overstepping our place by ascribing motives to SAC for their actions this year, but it seems to us the only logical reason for making these decisions is to preserve the status quo for its own sake — to simplify SAC’s own job by reducing it to rubber-stamping the same old Paces party proposal over and over again. It may make life easier for SAC members, but it’s harming campus life for everyone else, and we can’t keep letting them do it.

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