To the Editor:

To open this letter, I’d like to share a quote by philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, the author of the superbly written and delightfully concise treatise “In Defense of Anarchism.” He writes, “Men cannot meaningfully be called free if their representatives vote independently of their wishes, or when laws are passed concerning issues which they are not able to understand. Nor can men be called free who are subject to secret decisions, based on secret data, having unannounced consequences for their well-being and their very lives.”

While it is certainly exaggerating to state that the upcoming Vanderbilt Student Government elections will have such dire unannounced consequences for our well-being and lives, I would, following the axioms he has laid out, conclude that the Vanderbilt student body cannot meaningfully be called free so long as it succumbs to the clutches of VSG.

The reorganization of Interhall and SGA into VSG has done nothing other than to muddle the alphabet soup masquerading as the voice of the student body. No streamlining has taken place, nor does it appear to lie on the horizon: after all, VSG will have a budget at least that of the combined budgets of Interhall or SGA. In other words, VSG may get more money than its constituent parts ever did. That doesn’t sound like streamlining to me, nor does the fact that the number of offices in the combined government has not shrunk significantly from the combined memberships of SGA and Interhall.

All of this, combined with the fact that only approximately 20 percent of the undergraduate population voted in the (heavily rushed) referendum to merge SGA and Interhall suggests that a rather large majority of Vanderbilt students either don’t know or don’t care.

I don’t think that Vanderbilt students should stand for a student government that does not have the student body’s best interests in mind. I believe that Vanderbilt deserves a student government that stands for freedom and fiscal responsibility.

Therefore, with this letter, I am formally announcing my write-in candidacy for the office of VSG president. However, I do not seek this office for myself — a technicality states that I have to have a year of experience to run, but bad statutes have never stopped the course of liberty — but I seek it for you, the student of Vanderbilt, who has put up with more excessive government than you ever have had inflicted upon you.
If elected, I would work not only toward addressing student problems through more direct means than a bloated student government, but also toward dissolving VSG entirely, ending the cycle of AcFee taxation with only marginal representation combined with arbitrariness in expenditures and election procedures.

A friend of my once asked, “What could SGA have done that a large enough group of concerned students couldn’t have?” Likewise, I ask what Interhall could have done that the excellent existing resident-adviser programming infrastructure could not have. Why should we put up with yet more bureaucracy? Why should we put up with yet more officeholders? Finally, why should we, the students, continue to put up with a student government so out of touch with the rest of the undergraduate population that it now, in a bid to protect its own, requires that all candidates have a year of experience to run for its highest offices?

I’m not going to put up with that, and neither should you.

Write in Kevin McNish for VSG president on Jan. 30. You won’t regret it.

Kevin McNish, Arts and Science ’08