Last week’s editorial suggested that the uncontested election of the four highest officers in student government represents a moral failing on individual and institutional levels. The editors implied that limited participation in campus-wide elections, considering the number of students involved in student government in high school, is due to lazy and apathetic students “simply unwilling to put in the work” of voting or running, and the student body is chastised for not living up to the Amherst ideal of “engagement with the Real World and Things They Care About” [sic]. Though they come close to elucidating the true cause of this phenomenon (“perhaps there is less incentive”), this interpretation makes the classic mistake of the protosociology of the privileged: hating the players, not the game.

Students who seek office are not interested in individual notions of service or artificial motions of democracy. The motivation is self-interest. (Not that students rationally calculate the costs and benefits that an investment of time will bring in terms of future profits. The calculation is made subconsciously, in terms of affect, tastes, desires, and drives — but perhaps less so now, for the reasons below.) Being elected to the AAS is a strategy undertaken if the symbolic rewards attendant to the position are likely to yield a material profit in the future. Today, the status of elected office is in decline. First, students have a disenchanted view of student government, due either to their previous experience or to the transparent irrelevance of the body to the life of the College (as demonstrated by the tragicomic fact that undercutting MASSPIRG is its most stimulating exploit in recent memory, and as elided by its symbolic effort to paper over a miserly rollback in academic quality). Second, perhaps underlying the first, the objective worth of such offices, in terms of their translatability into material advancement and economic advantage through the résumé, the interview and developed skills, is plummeting in an age when hypertrophic capital decimates the middle classes and their illusions.

The perpetual puzzlement of The Student staff at the relative success of their journalistic rivals is explained by the same token. Other publications are mechanisms of the production of elitist competencies and appetencies, which find their highest expression in glitzy, glossy, no-stakes, faux-academicist articles. They are training grounds that offer mobility — the prestige accorded to editing and editorializing over writing and reporting distinguishes and differentiates along current and future class lines. Objective reporting, talis qualis on this campus, represents an opportunity for advancement only to those of ethnically stigmatized and less-established socioeconomic origin. Student government office and Student reporting are becoming, because of the changing nature of the game, less valuable to the majority of Amherst students, leaving them to the campus minorities of the petit bourgeois and the ethnic other.

—Matthew Mendoza ’10