Tips for Running Your Student Organization…Into the Ground
The BLS Film Society
Not all student organizations are meant to succeed. Some are never meant to be started at all. Yet they proliferate at colleges and graduate schools around the world, most likely because the founders want a couple more lines of throat-clearing nonsense to fill up space on their resumes. Let me say this: if some poor sod hires you because you were the Vice Treasurer for the Bluegrass and the Law Club, you better wear a hardhat to protect yourself from that business or institution collapsing around you.
Brooklyn Law School, to be sure, boasts a variety of well-run, well-intentioned student organizations. BLSPI, among other noble deeds, provides one of the choicest spectacles of the academic year: the site of law students spastically flinging their arms in the air before one of 20 BarBri tuition coupons reach fifteen hundred dollars at the BLSPI auction. The ACLU and the Federalist Society host thought-provoking debates on almost painfully relevant topics. Organizations like these do things such as hold regular meetings, assign their executive board duties, and send several e-mails per week to those present on their listserv. I am sure the Brooklyn Law School Class of 2010 is equipped with more knowledge than they can handle about the massive amount of Thursday-night debauching their successors are engaging in at local watering holes.
This article is not for those organizations. This is instead a missive – a pamphlet if you will – for how to run a student organization operating on the very precipice of dignity. Those organizations that wondered how they ever passed the rigorous vetting process of the Student Bar Association.
1. “Co-Sponsor” Events with Other, More Responsible Organizations
It’s April, and you are slurping on another repulsive cup of street coffee. As you reach the lumpy chunks of congealed instant coffee grounds at the bottom of your cup, it strikes you: “Oh boy, I am the co-chair of a student organization! And we have neglected to hold a single event! Oh, the humanity!”
Don’t panic. There are other student organizations that are holding events, and they want you to co-sponsor their event with them. Why? Because it looks way cooler that way.
You must act quickly, for time is ticking away. Scan BLSConnect for any random event you observe. E-mail the organization’s leader, and express to them some attenuated connection your organization has to the event. Are they the Securities Law Organization (SLO), and are you the BLS Bingo Society (BLSBS)? Hey, both of your financial fortunes are contingent on old people regurgitating random numbers. Offer to chip in for sandwiches or soda or plates or something. Demand co-sponsorship in return. Do not back down.
And presto! Your organization has held an event.
2. Get Creative With E-Board Responsibilities
So, you at least have an e-board. Granted, that election you ran had all the democratic zeal of one run by Robert Mugabe, but still. But what do your e-board members do beyond bury their position in a discarded resume draft? Likely nothing. This, however, is where the framing and persuasive argument skills we all learn in law school come into play.
Does your treasurer have nothing to do with the financial affairs of the organization? You close-minded fools, our treasurer “treasures” the organization, in the affectionate sense!
Does your elected secretary fail to keep any sort of records or book event rooms? Cretins! Don’t you know that secretary also means “a writing desk with shelves on top of it” and that one’s brain could, in a metaphorical sense, be considered a desk with files and information inside and that, therefore, the secretary fulfills all their responsibilities by possessing any level of consciousness or sentience?
Just use these descriptions at your election meeting, if you even host one, and you’ll do just fine.
3. Set Unrealistically Ambitious Semester Goals
One way to benevolently sabotage your organization is to shoot for the stars. Lure students to one of our fine classrooms at the beginning of the semester with the promise of greasy food. And then, you soliloquize. You soliloquize about how your organization will have its “best semester yet” and “get guest speakers from inside the industry.” You’ll take field trips to relevant locations, and host networking events at rooftop speakeasies. Pump the room full of a vigorous, yet ultimately empty, energy.
Then, you wait. You wait until about March, or November, and send an e-mail to your listserv. You write something like “Sorry guys, we really shot for the stars this semester but we just couldn’t make it happen.” Do not provide any explanation as to what exactly you mean by “just couldn’t make it happen.” This will invite unnecessary questions and suspicion. And then, you commence recommendations one and two.
4. Promote Events That No One Actually Wants to Attend
The more involved cousin of tip number 3, but it will prove just as effective in (excusably) flat-lining your organization, while still allowing you to say “Hey, we tried.”
Brainstorm event ideas that not only will be difficult to execute, but also are either boring, uninteresting or weird. This provides the perfect excuse for cancelling your event “due to lack of interest” or because of “campus outcry.” Promote a screening of the movie “Plan 9 From Outer Space” without the Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary, or a movie about a racist dog. Plaster fliers all over campus about an underwater bingo in the fifth-floor men’s bathroom. The Meta-Club can shout from the mountaintops about a “Panel Discussion about Panel Discussions.” You get the idea. Your organization will be visible, yet largely ignored and marginalized, which means less work for you.
I wish you the best of success in running your student organization into the ground.
First of all, I am concerned that MEP will be a casualty of the sort described in this article, and I thank you for the tips. While MEP has a goal of “50+” students in Fall of 2012, we have exactly 3 committed at this time. It may be more of an experiment than a club, but its failure will illustrate the arrogance of the student body: clearly we are all masters of making smart financial decisions and a club promoting such practices is not worth $250/semester in funding from the SBA (Thrift Club has expressed concerns that its budget will not be upwardly adjusted to account for MEP). It may also illustrate the busy-ness of the student body – most students don’t care about being in any clubs whatsoever, and those that do care have to pick and choose wisely how they are going to obtain their free lunch. (Moreover, MEP requires proactive student participation, and law students will likely not want to do lots of elementary school math, as it forces them to look at their “poor” lives and not the black letter law that is truly the most important thing to learn in law school.)
Of course, I recognize the high satire of it, but I have to say that promoting events that are difficult to execute, uninteresting, weird or boring is an exercise in double-layered cynicism. The Open Mic Night ad was a cynical attempt to thwart student interest – and the event itself was a cynical response to the need for all student org events to have a “legal focus.” While there was a small public outcry over those ads, the event itself was a success. We raised $47 (!yay!) for Sanctuary for Families, we all got drunk, we were all well fed by Side Street Deli and Sahadi’s, I got to monopolize the microphone for about 30 minutes, two students performed vagina monologues, three students played music, one student engaged in a piece of performance art worthy of Artaud’s theater of cruelty, then later read Keats, a non-student performed an extraordinary reading of a 19th century text by a French economist, and one student performed stand-up comedy. If you were in that room that night you would have felt more love and solidarity than any other BLS event has been able to provide – a place for the freaks of the school to be themselves and not the weird legal machines they wanted to become when they enrolled here.
BLS Film Society is a resource that must not dissolve. There was interest in going to see “Shame” during Fall finals which I doubt was ever communicated to the club. “Shame” (like “Black Swan” a year ago) would be the perfect film for Finals time. BLS Film Society should do a “movies about law school” marathon and have a drinking game to go with it.
I think we are all fortunate that someone with such a disdain for 95% of the student body did not get elected president.
You know, I try not to start fights on comment strings. BLS Advocate won the award for community service last night, in part because we are able to have dialogues like this.
Once again I have been misinterpreted. My comment was not meant to express any kind of disdain, and was written in a style to reflect the style of the article.
I am sick of trolls on this site who have no other purpose than to hurt the feelings of those who express their opinions.
A one sentence pithy response where you hide your identity is cowardly.
The 50/50 rule is being revised to the 40/60 rule in light of last night’s conversations – in which case I disdain 60% of the student body, not 95%. Get your facts straight!
What is MEP? It’s not listed as a student group on the website so I’m having a bit of trouble following. Thanks.
Also, as someone who really couldn’t care less about student government politics (in general, but especially in law school), I also find these harsh comments to be entirely too sophomoric for someone who I can only imagine would describe themselves as mature and even if not, is clearly over the age of 22.
Let’s all be honest with ourselves here: the SBA doles out money to the student organizations and plans Beer & Pizza and Barrister’s Ball. All nice things, but this isn’t particularly something to be high and mighty over. Grow up.
MEP is Monthly Expense Project. It is not listed on BLS Connect because…well, I wonder why, I wonder why…But the SBA has voted on my proposal and approved it and recognized it as a new student organization for 2012-2013.
MEP is a way for law students to help manage their own finances. MEP will collect data on all expenditures that participants make for 30 days, anonymously of course, and will average them out so that students will be able to see where they line up on the spending graph. I think it’s important not only when you’re going through Chapter 7 (which requires debtors to do something similar to this –but nothing this intense) but also when you HAVE income, and most importantly when you DO NOT have income.
It will be posted up there next year.
I also don’t think any of my comments are harsh. if you read my “long” comment above, you would see it is about love and togetherness. maybe it’s my writing style that bothers people. I try VERY HARD to get at the truth.
369 people voted.
It’s better voting participation than I expected, but still too low. And, to be clear, I like the SBA! I am a part of it! I just don’t like people that are mean to me for no reason.
I’m not really sure whether you’re referring to me or “Phew” in your comment but I’m gonna assume the former. If you want to call me sophomoric, fine. You’re entitled to your opinion. I am a 2nd year student after all.
I was calling Phew sophomoric.
Phew!
White dog is a piece of cinematic genius that goes unseen and unappreciated by many, mainly because they believe it to be about a racist dog. But it is so much more than that! It challenges modern ideas of violence and power dynamics through race and gender. I can’t think of a more worthy enterprise. Also, Burl Ives is fantastic in it. I found this blog by googling “racist dog advocate” as I am wont to do. Shame on you, Jim Gallagher! SHAME!
Sir or Madam,
I am dismayed by your response. Your rambunctious outburst is premised on two faulty notions, which I will address in turn.
1. The Movie “About a Racist Dog” about which I speak is in fact, White Dog.
-Did you, friend, see the words “White Dog” appear in my missive? No. You did not. I could have just as easily been speaking about a hypothetical “movie about a racist dog” that does not exist, just as the MST3K version of “Plan 9 From Outer Space” does not, in fact, exist (they determined it to be too difficult to speak over the narrator, though a live version does exist). I could have been talking about “Lassie” (did you ever see Lassie save any black, Hispanic, Indonesian, Dominican, Honduran, Arabian, Somalian or Belarusian people?). You assumed, which, as you know, makes an assu out of me.
2. The Google Search “Racist Dog Advocate” Turns Up My Article Within the First 700 Pages of Results
-It does not. I checked. One would have to Google “Racist dog blsadvocate” to get a hit.
Listen, you loudmouthed turnip impersonator: if you care to debate me in a public forum, unsheathe your sword and let us battle!
Dude, what is with the jab at 2010?
Can we get some clarification on it? Is it because of the absurd plaque that got put up in the library, despite the fact that something like 4-7% of the class body actually voted in favor of it?
I guess my year was pretty badass, but I’m just interested to know about the source of the reputation.
My disdain for the Class of 2010 has no discernible bounds. “The hard” thing is to believe that the Law School allowed any of you misanthropes to leave with diplomas.
Kidding.
Really, I was just imagining a scenario where people who graduated two years ago are still getting BLSPI bar night e-mails in their personal accounts. The Class of 2010 graduated recently enough that it would be feasible that they could still be on student org listservs, but long enough ago that getting those e-mails would be pretty annoying.