Woke and Choke: Campus Leftists Seek Total Power Over Student Taxes to Enrich Themselves and Their Friends

I've promised myself I would go dark for both January and February 2020...and I'm breaking a promise to myself. I can't help it. I enjoy following the politics of Williams College too much.

The latest story of interest in the Williams Record is a proposal to transform the existing student government. It will be enacted in a referendum which ends this Friday which only needs a majority vote with no quorum. It is a complete power grab situation. There aren't any practical ways to rebut it either. No allowance for debate, for a counter argument on the ballot, nothing.

The existing student council is a disorganized, unregulated mess. The students have no idea how to run a meeting and it shows. A large number of students want to abolish it all together.

The only way to make sense of things, however, is to understand that everything they are doing is designed to advance the interests of black students at the expense of everyone else. The new three pillar program sets up a separate, elected group to hand out the student taxes called Facilitators for Allocating Student Taxes (FAST), another group called The Advisory Board for Lobbying and Elections (TABLE) that is meant to pick the students who serve on various college committees, and a rump organization called the Williams Student Union (WSU) which - as far as I can tell - would be a weak, nearly powerless group charged with announcing leftist policy positions and bargaining with the Williams College administration.

The only way to make sense of this is to look at it as a way for black students to gain unfair advantages over white students. First, the FAST group gets to make its decisions in secret. The only way to deny a funding request is to get four of the five people to vote against it. Under these circumstances, the Black Student Union (BSU) can make a request for money for fried chicken for only black students and the FAST would find it nearly impossible to block this request. The new FAST would also delete the earlier provision that funds distributed should benefit all students. Neat... As a political scientist, I can predict that FAST will soon be a hotbed of corruption as the students making the decisions will use their power to enrich themselves, advantage their political allies, and screw over those they disagree with to the best of their ability. They will already be receiving a salary for what appears to be the most trivial clerical work...the sort of stuff and part-time administrative assistant could easily handle.

The TABLE group is designed to allow a small handful of students...existing co-chairs of existing student-faculty committees...pick the next generation of co-chairs. The aim, as far as I can tell, is to completely block any possibility of a white conservative guy providing service to the Williams College community.

Finally, the new Student Union would be a frail imitation of the earlier College Council because it will be cut off from of its real power...the distribution of money...and its real influence...the appointment of students to various committees. All that will be left is a perfunctory, powerless group which will apparently function largely to implement a hopeless task...represent the general student interest to the faculty. The reality of the situation is that the real power for representing the students to the administration will logically flow to the Black Student Union and perhaps, the leaders of the Minority Coalition. This is because, as we all know, there will never be a White Student Union designed to fight for the interest of the white male students on campus who are harmed by giving their personal funds over to a student group which will then direct that money to what it appears will be exclusive black student functions. The whole thing is just sick.

The only intelligent thing about this new arrangement is that it dumps a College Council structure that was a leftist mass of bullshit with broadly spread powers and responsibilities. The new FAST and TABLE will be democratically elected and ten times more powerful that the existing College Council. Meanwhile, the new Student Union will remain silent as the Black Student Union becomes the de facto representative of student interests on campus.

The white, male, Christian conservative students will literally have no representation, no where to go, no one to speak on their behalf. From the perspective of you black activist student the proposed arrangement gives you everything you could want 1) complete control over a large amount of student tax money, 2) almost complete control of the appointment of students to key committees, and 3) a greatly weakened student union with no power and little to no legitimacy. It's perfect.