Religion, Diversity, Student Government

I write a lot of happy things about Olin. When I write negative things, it tends to be in course reflections, and the negatives are usually accompanied by some positives.

But on Monday night, the student government voted down an amendment that would have (in its final form) required that the student government consider the calendar of religious observances important to the current student body before scheduling an event meant for the entire study body.

Let me reiterate: that they consider the calendar. Not that they not schedule an all-student event conflicting with a religious observance kept by a current student, which is what the original form of the amendment would have done. Just that they look at a calendar constructed based on religious holidays that students tell the school that they observe in a survey at the beginning of the year. The proposed survey would have allowed students to state specific times that should be blocked out, not even whole days; for example, for Maundy Thursday people would probably mark 7-9 or so as time at church. In the original amendment the whole day wouldn't have been off-limits for an event, just those hours.

The arguments made against the amendment were that it mixes religion and government, that it prioritizes religious identity over other identities (national, identity as engineer, etc), and that students shouldn't have to organize their lives around other students' religious observances.

A focus over the past year and a half, and especially this year, has been being more aware of diversity at Olin and continuing to increase it. Along some axes, Olin is not currently a particularly diverse place. There's been a lot of effort in the admissions department to start addressing our lack of racial and socioeconomic diversity. There have been a number of conversations in the student body about diversity more broadly, including discussions with students and candidates at all three Candidates Weekends. Those discussions have been necessary because we weren't talking about diversity enough before, and in some ways the community had been stifling existing diversity.

As far as religious identity goes, in a couple of the classes above me, there were people who were very vocally anti-religion, and Olin's culture was actively secular. The attitude of staff/administration when I started at Olin didn't help, though that has improved enormously over the past two or three years. The attitudes in the student body have improved as certain individuals have graduated and as discussions around diversity have started, but actively secular is still a pretty accurate description. It's not a hostile environment to religion, but it's not particularly welcoming, either.

Someone mentioned at the meeting tonight that this shouldn't be in the student government by-laws; this should be something people are generally respectful of when scheduling events. Several of us said that we wanted to believe that there could be a culture of that respect, but the opposite had been modeled repeatedly over the past few years. Spring formal, which uses an enormous fraction of the student activities budget, has been scheduled on one of the first nights of Passover for four years in a row. (This year, after realizing this, it was moved, but it never had been in the past.) Two years ago, that night was also Good Friday. After that year, we were told that the next year formal would definitely not be scheduled over a major religious observance...and once again, it was.

So we have to start somewhere. This amendment wouldn't have covered all identities that would make it inconvenient or impossible for someone to attend or participate in an all-student event, but it was a start. It would have acknowledged one type of identity where issues had arisen in the past. We hoped that it would encourage greater awareness of religious diversity in the student body and greater respect for each other's observances. The survey proposed by the amendment would have collected key religious observances from all students, and the student government calendar of observances would have included all of them, regardless of how many students at Olin observed a particular holiday as long as it was at least one.

But the (modified) amendment failed; it needed 13 out of 17 votes and only got 12.

It would be an understatement to say that I'm disappointed.