Voting too soon for a sticky campaign

There are several issues of concern and contradiction inherent in the current campaign for the addition of a conservative culture rep and the attitudes leading up to today's election for or against it. But the student body will not get a chance to debate these concerns, as this election is perhaps happening too efficiently and rather hastily.

The Elections Board should probably have pushed the election back or publicized it more widely and effectively to give students due exposure to the issue before voting occurred. Few students are even aware that elections on the recent proposal are being held today, and even fewer are likely to be able to make a well-informed decision after its hasty campaign. On a whole, students probably do not feel like they know too much about what the conservative culture rep would be, let alone why they should vote for it. And there is no way that freshman have a clue what a culture representative is and what the lengthy struggle over their voting rights has been.

The little campaigning that has occurred seems mostly to have come from currently-existing culture reps who are opposed to the idea of adding a new conservative culture rep to their mix. However, in looking at the issue more closely, this opposition seems slightly hypocritical on the part of current culture reps. If they are indeed arguing that minority groups need representation on campus, it is a bit counterintuitive that they are so opposed to the creation of a minority culture rep. The real reason is likely that they feel their power will be de-legitimized by the existence of a culture rep from a group that has consistently mocked the culture representative system. This refusal to accept new players in the system illustrates the randomness and exclusiveness of the culture representative idea in the first place.

Perhaps this contradiction points to the larger argument that the whole idea of culture reps runs counter to what Tufts and its organizations should truly foster _ cooperative diversity, rather than divisive diversity. While differences between groups and people should be celebrated, saying that one group has special interests and must be specially represented because they are of a certain color or possess a certain ideology or any distinct characteristic simply defines and places people by rigid compartments.

What we need to do is look beyond such stereotyping of interests and issues, and if diversity is what we truly seek to foster, vote no to any efforts to promote diversity simply for its own sake.