This week, I finally ordered my cap & gown and made a decision on where I’m going next year. There are only a few more weeks until I graduate and write my last column in this newspaper. So, for today and the next three weeks, I will share my final thoughts about undergraduate life at Caltech. In particular, I will try to answer the question, “What is wrong with Caltech?”

There are a lot of things wrong with Caltech, but the reason I have been writing in this paper over the past year is that I strongly believe the solutions to almost all of these problems are in the hands of students. What’s wrong with Caltech? It’s the students. We are doing a great number of things wrong, and we have been doing them for decades.

There are probably very few undergraduates that agree with that statement. Many would blame “the administration” for the problems they perceive. However, anyone that has ever actually worked with administrators knows that “the administration” is a grossly over-generalized scapegoat – there is no behind-the-scenes conspiracy and there is no single administrator running the show.

So what are the common problems that students have with Caltech? At the top there are only a few. One of them is the academic workload, which students tried to address in earnest at the recent Student-Faculty Conference. I was surprised by the mixed response to a lot of questions about workload, and that helps illustrate an important point: there is no universal student opinion on any of these issues; “the students” can be as much of a generalization as “the administration”. In any case, there are many quick fixes (revisions to the Catalog, adjustment of various requirements) and some long-term solutions (Dean of Undergraduate Studies) being implemented to tackle the workload issues, so I’m not going to discuss them at length.

The other oft-repeated concern of students is that the administration is taking away student freedoms – that our self-governance is being threatened. This belief is at the core of all the administration-student conflicts that have escalated dramatically over the past two years. It is also an issue that I don’t think anyone really understands. The loudest opinions of students are overly simplistic and flawed, and the actions of administrators have been clumsy and misguided.

The issue at hand is self-governance, and I believe strongly that the onus is on the students to solve these problems themselves. The mistakes of administrators are often blamed on a failure to solicit student input – put in other words, one could say that the fault lies with students for failing to make their own opinions heard. Perhaps this blame falls on the student government for not communicating student views to the administration. I was President of the student body for a year, and I will be the first to admit that I regret not speaking up enough on issues like the house system, the library, and the fire policy. However, I also rarely had people complain about those things to me during my term, so they never reached the top of my priority list above health insurance, Vectors, or donuts.

What makes SELF-governance work is taking it upon yourSELF to speak up when you have a concern. When there is something you care strongly about and find others who support your opinion, it is imperative that you get involved and do something about it. When you sit in your room and complain to your friends about what the administration is and isn’t doing, you are openly dismissing the whole notion of self-governance. You’re sitting idle complaining about how other people are governing your life rather than governing your life yourself.

I’ve told this to some people and they’ve said that they just don’t have time to get involved with student life issues. That’s where the miracle of representative democracy comes into play. While you may not have time to deal with student issues, there are people in ASCIT and House government that are ready and willing to work on your behalf. In fact, 215 different students held some student government office this past year.

Unfortunately, students don’t always go to the student government when they have problems. Far too often, I’ve seen students try to circumvent their student leaders in an attempt to find “who’s really in charge”. It is the actions of these students that are really undermining student self-governance at Caltech.

Imagine how well the honor system would fare if professors consistently went straight to the Dean instead of talking with the BoC. That’s exactly what happens when students go straight to the Provost to talk about the library situation without informing the ASCIT BoD, when Houses report interhouse conflicts to the CRC rather than trying to resolve things amongst themselves, and when frosh complain directly to Kim West about hazing without first telling the upperclassmen in their House.

Students have repeatedly shown that they don’t trust the student government to solve their problems. Every time they do it, they take power away from students and give it to administrators. We love to tell administrators that they should just trust students, but that’s not likely to happen when we don’t even trust each other.

Self-governance doesn’t simply mean that the administration is supposed to leave us alone. It means that each person has a responsibility to govern his own conduct and that when conflicts occur, we must trust our own system to resolve the issue.