For a school this small.....

....we've got a great deal of decentralization in the student body leadership.

• College Council, to some degree, makes sense. The school elects representatives who meet regularly with the administration and who allocate a large budget to student groups. The appointments committee also selects semi-autonomous committee members, along with student chairs of those committees. The big three committees: Educational Policy (CEP), Undergraduate Life (CUL), and Priorities and Resources (CPR).

• Then there's MINCO. The Minority Coalition also disperses funds from the administration, meaning that it lost money that CC kept during the recent budget cuts (not that there's a lack of money, mind you). It's made up of a wide variety of small groups (KoW, AASIA, BSU, QSU, VISTA, SoCA, JRC, etc) that sends Minco reps to the greater counsel, which is supposed to coordinate efforts, I suppose

• Completing the Paresky student office triumvirate are the Neighborhoods, who send 4 reps total to CC, and who are supposed to represent residential needs to the administration (microwaves and such) and to hold events.

Within these three, two represent the entire student body, two plan programming, and two have centralized leadership (the neighborhoods, of course, have four separate presidents.) Let's go on.

• The Junior Advisers are led by an advisory board and co-presidents from each class, who pass the baton from year to year. While the JA leadership only controls matters relating to JAs, that means that many aspects of the freshman year are under the auspices of the JA leadership, and disconnected from any of the above.

• The athletic team leaders run separate programming, and the Student Athletic Advisory Committee coordinates efforts and outreach between teams. I don't know enough about these groups to write much further.

• All Campus Entertainment receives a substantial budget from CC, and puts on First Fridays, as well as other events. WCFM also does concerts occasionally.

• Lehman Council coordinates all community service.

• Gargoyle seeks to take the most concerned minds from each senior class, and put them in a room together.

• The Honor Committee represents the student body to itself, and acts/is elected completely separately from anything else. It and the Major Advisory Committees are the primary non-CEP ways that students lead in the academic realm.

• And then there are the one thousand and one student groups, each of which need coordination, as well as the student supervisors of various jobs on campus.

In summary, there are gadzooks of ways to lead at Williams, but not many ways to coordinate with other leaders. Do we need them?