Education and the Democratic Process

I'm not sure exactly what everyone ate before the last class; but while people starve worldwide, wars rage, and genocide is allowed to continue, we argued heatedly about the morality of American's choice to use part of our tuition money to provide a public service for the community. A public service that benefits the school and student body in various ways, no less.

Someone brought up idea that, although we pay tuition, we do not receive a vote on the decisions for the regular goings on within the school. There were several issues with this that I would like to explore.

First, a school is not a democracy by any stretch of the imagination. Unlike in a democracy, intelligence is usually a factor for progression through the academic hierarchy. As to the idea that we (the tuition-paying students) do not vote for the board of trustees and other such positions. Would we want to? Would we do a better job? The answer to both is probably not. Additionally, if money is the deciding factor in these decisions, then the trustees likely have enough votes to elect themselves by this logic.

This idea leads me into another similar idea. If this country was a democracy where the number of votes each person got was based on the amount that they paid in taxes and contributions to the government, people like Bill Gates and hedge fund managers would be able to cancel out whole inter-city neighborhoods during the elections, hardly a democratic way of going about it. In the same way, at this school, should people on scholarship get less of a say? American already runs more heavily on tuition than almost any other school, as President Kerwin told us, so therefore we already have a larger say over the workings of the school than nearly any other student body in the country.

So to bring it back to WAMU, whether we agree with it or not, as a relatively uneducated public in regard to the financial workings of the university and its support of WAMU and the possible kickbacks that are included, it is hardly in our place to take one statistic and to decide that we should have a popular uprising. This may be college, but we're not all Che Guevara.