Here’s the path to a high-level position in student government: hold appointed cabinet positions as a freshman and a sophomore, become Senate Head as a junior, and then rise to President, Director of Committee Affairs, or Treasurer as a senior. Variations on that theme occur, of course, but generally that’s how you do it.

One of the three candidates for president is the DCA, and a Senate Head is campaigning to take his spot. Another one of the presidential hopefuls is Treasurer, and among the students vying to replace him is another Senate Head. All eight students running for Senate Heads are sophomores. An “in” in the previous issue of the “The Weekly’s” in-and-outs declared “Charlie for Prez” in reference to, unsurprisingly, the only freshman on cabinet.

Overall, this system works well. If the student body votes to fill the elected Cabinet positions with smart, hardworking students, as it usually does, and if those students choose other smart, hardworking students for the appointed positions, as they usually do, most likely Cabinet will function well. Of course, “usually” isn’t the same as “always,” and of course there have been times when the people elected or appointed to Cabinet weren’t the smartest or the most hardworking. But generally, or at least compared to the committees, Cabinet consists of people who are both competent and objectively-chosen.

As a consequence of the success of its member-selection system, much of the actual work done by Student Government — from organizing plenaries to communicating with the administration to supervising Senates — gets done by someone on Cabinet. Unfortunately, that creates a new issue — Cabinet only has 15 – 16 members, six to seven of whom are elected, which basically means all the underclassmen who want to get involved in Student Government, and potentially seek higher office, have to compete for only nine spots. (The number of elected positions on Cabinet can change depending on how many Senate Heads there are.).

Approximately 80 students apply for appointed Cabinet positions every year, according to Student Government faculty advisor Jeanne Barr. That means, mathematically, fewer than one out of eight students who hope to follow the traditional path to high office in Student Government can actually take that road.

And as a result, the pool of candidates for President, DCA, Treasurer (and even just Senate Head) from which students choose is very small. Plus, to add insult to injury, many of the  freshmen and sophomores who once felt enthusiastic about Student Government but were rejected for Cabinet positions end up deeply apathetic.

One of the members of “The Weekly’s” editorial board had an actual conversation with Editor-in-Chief Owen Marks that went as follows.

“Owen, why don’t you do anything in student government?”

“I applied for a student government position at the end of eighth grade, and I didn’t get it, and then I applied again at the end of ninth grade and I still didn’t get it. So then I was just like, ‘Ok,  guess I’ll do ‘Weekly.’ And now I’m Editor.”

Marks’s experience isn’t everyone’s, of course. Some people try harder than he did to get involved. But it’s worth noting how once he didn’t get a spot on Cabinet, he believed his only option was to run for a committee, which isn’t much of an option at all.

In theory, Marks — and the approximately 71 applicants who will end up rejected for Cabinet positions next fall — should get involved in Student  Government through committees, on which there are seemingly spots aplenty. Once on a committee, a student gets chances to learn the ropes of student government and to improve his electability/appointability by meeting upperclassmen who could help him rise (e.g. potential elected members of Cabinet) and distinguishing himself through motivation and competence in the eyes of voting students.

And yet Marks decided to go with “The Weekly.” So either he gives up extremely quickly or running for committee isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. The members of the “The Weekly”’s editorial board suspect that in this case the latter explanation is the right one. Two flaws of the committee system stand out as reasons why Marks made — and next year’s rejected applicants might make — the shift from student government to something else.

The first flaw is that people who win spots on committees or find themselves invited onto winning slates tend to be more popular than smart or hardworking. Most students don’t know who the people on each slate are or how the platforms of the slates differ in committee races, so even if they wanted to, they couldn’t vote for the most competent set of candidates. And many students think that many of the committees serve no purpose besides resume-puffery, so they have no reason to do anything other than just vote for their friends.

Obviously some of this holds true for elected Cabinet positions too, but because a) our system allocates plenary time for candidates seeking those positions to present themselves and their platforms, and b) the people who run for those positions tend to be the highest of the high-profile, students’ voting for their friends instead of the best candidate seems to be much less of a problem for those positions.

The second flaw is that even students who do manage to snag a spot on a committee often find themselves doing very little, and those who do find themselves doing stuff still get few chances to interact with Cabinet members or to present themselves to the student body in a way that could get them out there.

So this editorial is going to end with a plea. “The Weekly” doesn’t know how the plan it wants would work or what it would entail exactly, but we do know that if Student Government is going to flourish, it needs to somehow create more low-level positions that don’t involve committees but do include chances to work with Cabinet. Making this plan won’t be easy, but the potential upside — in terms of both more diverse and interesting pools of candidates for the elected Cabinet positions and greater involvement in student government in general — is too huge to ignore.