The student leadership quandary

Student leadership positions in university are crucial for students to engage with unique opportunities. These roles give students valuable experience within their field, improve communication, and develop management skills. In addition, these jobs are often an opportunity for students to meaningfully contribute to their communities. Unfortunately, student turnover, a lack of accountability and a lack of proper training have created an environment that is not conducive to student success, breeding bias and weak management in student organizations.

Management positions are rarely held for longer than two years, due to the unlikelihood that first- and second-year students will be chosen for leadership positions with little experience. As a result, leadership positions go to students who are closer to graduation, with heavier workloads and different priorities. Conversely, the longer that a student holds a leadership position, the more the organization depends on them and is damaged when the student graduates. In addition, graduating students, with an upcoming transition, may feel little connection or responsibility for their organization and therefore fall short when equipping incoming leaders with training and support due to their upcoming departure. When asked, Isabelle Callan, co-founder and co-leader of the poetry club, said, “I feel a strong sense of responsibility for what happens to my club because I was a part of founding it. For club leads who don’t have this experience, I can easily see how they might not feel as invested in the future of their clubs.” Asking leaders with one foot out the door to take the necessary time to train new people is often difficult due to their focus shifting to grad school or life beyond university.

Many student organizations, such as clubs, have policies that involve elections or specific hiring committees to select future leaders. However, there exists a gap between policy and practice. In practice, applications are opened by existing leaders for incoming positions. Without training or oversight, this application process is not designed for equity. Students are often inundated with work outside of these organizations, which pressures them to complete these hiring practices quickly, rather than thoroughly. While policies may outline more thorough procedures, it often goes unenforced and offers no real consequence to cutting corners. Without training on equitable hiring practices, policies are easily exploited and perpetuate a cycle of these processes being fast-tracked in order to save time and effort, even if it means sacrificing quality. A possible addition to training for hiring practices is having these processes overseen or enforced by staff or by regulations within the necessary systems for student positions to prevent cronyism. By having students interview one another for incoming positions, without training or oversight, groups often find themselves packed with candidates chosen for their social connections, rather than their merits. By giving hiring power to untrained students in management positions, new or unconnected students are far less likely to get jobs for which they may be well qualified. Forcing students to choose between maintaining social ties and ensuring strong leadership leads to hiring friends over qualified candidates. This is especially pertinent when student leaders will graduate before seeing the results of their hiring decisions. This problem in policy is highly exploitable. If an independent student organization does hiring at the end of each year as staff members graduate, the people on the hiring committee will not see the consequences of their hiring decisions. This is a major structural issue. If students have no accountability to their own policy, student organizations will always have a gap between policy and practice, which can lead to hiring practices that can be done in bad faith. This means that beyond altruism, student leaders have little cause to better the organizations they work for. Oftentimes, altruism loses to social pressure.

I believe that the systems that are designed to empower student leaders are fundamentally flawed and do not provide a sufficient foundation. Students who are effective student leaders at Bishop’s are successful despite, not because of, the systems in place.