Is student government overfunded?

Leslie-Bernard Joseph '06 has outlined a substantial paradigm shift in the way we think about student government, and his ideas bear careful consideration beyond the immediate context of the campaign.

The utilitarian ethics underlying Joseph's vision are difficult to contend with. Indeed, the campaign would have been much more interesting if Joseph had explicitly articulated the concrete implications of his ethical premises.

A logical extension of Joseph's reasoning could be stated as follows: it is morally indefensible to commit considerable USG resources to addressing students' relatively narrow quality-of-life issues when there are more pressing global problems to be solved. How, Joseph asks, can we think about buying more treadmills for Dillon when we know that people lack adequate food, housing and medical care? One could imagine Peter Singer smiling as he read Joseph's platform.

I don't want to overstate Joseph's case. I do not understand him to insist that Princeton students forego personal luxuries in some dramatic gesture of ascetic self-denial. I don't think Joseph ever meant to dismiss all Princetonian's quality-of-life concerns as petty, selfish or trivial. But at the very least, he did affirm that the Princeton community — starting with the USG — should learn to place its problems in a somewhat broader perspective.

There is something profoundly reasonable about the idea that the USG should get "some perspective." But our reasoning about the relative importance of a given problem will always depend on the comparisons we draw. The movement to lower Pequod prices can easily be framed as real service to others if we compare it to the concerns of the USG Puddle Commission. But if we compare the Pequod problem to the global AIDS pandemic, then we begin to doubt the justice of spending a cent to subsidize cheaper course packets when that cent could be subsidizing anti-retroviral drug treatment for HIV patients.

So just how broad should our perspective — or the perspective of the USG — really be? We could join Peter Singer in the affirmation that in all instances, all allocaters of resources should take the most global perspective humanly possible. But even the most idealistic among us sense the practical impossibility of thinking and acting from a maximally global perspective during every minute of every day. We can be more sensitive to the relative severity of other people's problems, but we cannot simply stop believing that our own problems really do matter.

So let's say the USG were to successfully transform into an engine for social justice. What then? Would there suddenly be no need for a body that addressed student's narrow quality-of-life concerns? If we cannot realistically demand that students think globally all the time, we will always need some organization to handle the concerns raised during our more parochial moments. We can make the USG as altruistic as we'd like, but students will still need some forum to air their "petty" grievances. Why not accept that the USG is that forum?

This is evidently why the 'Prince' editorial last week suggested that Joseph was running for the wrong position. If we define the USG as the body that addresses our non-global concerns, it makes little sense to criticize the USG for having an insufficiently global perspective.

But to stop here is to fundamentally miss the point of Joseph's candidacy. The admission that there will always be a need for an organization that addresses the mundane concerns of students does not imply an embrace of the status quo. We all agree that some resources must be allocated to make the "little" improvements to campus life, but what if the current provisions are too great?

The relevant objection, then, is not that the USG misallocates its own resources, but that the USG has too much to allocate. We cannot make the USG into something that it is not; but we can argue that, for what it is, the USG has more funding than it needs.

Perhaps Joseph's concerns would best be met if the University transferred half of the USG budget to the Student Volunteers Council. If Joseph is right that an ethos of civic responsibility is lacking on the Princeton campus, then the obvious solution would be to dramatically expand the mandate and funding of the SVC. I imagine that a proposal to increase the resources of the SVC at the expense of the USG would be highly contentious, but I don't see how we can avoid debating the question. Joseph deserves due credit for sparking the debate. Jeremy Golubcow-Teglasi is a religion major from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at golubcow@princeton.edu.