Far too much decision-making is being done in the dark. Our leaders are not just making decisions behind closed doors, but we’re allowing them to do it.
Lawmakers in Wisconsin last week held a late-night vote to finally pass legislation regarding the state workers’ union’s collective bargaining rights that have been a major contention point for weeks in the Wisconsin government. After 14 democratic legislators left Wisconsin to prevent such a vote from taking place, republican senators discovered they could hold a vote as long as they revised the bill so it no longer spent money.
This sort of covert legislative action is not as rare an action as we might hope to believe. Even closer, the people who make the decisions that govern our lives are often looking for loopholes and exploits that will allow them to do what they want without having to deal with people who disagree.
Try to imagine how many meetings must take place between members of our own University administration. Consider how many departments communicate with each other and how much paper and e-mails they generate. Finally, consider how many of those meetings, letters and e-mails think to include people with dissenting opinions into the conversation.
We tend to think transparency is important because it lets everyone see what the leaders of any community are doing. But it’s more than that. Transparency is important because it’s the only way to ensure our leaders are approaching issues from all sides and including dissenting views in the discourse.
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said of transparency, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.” That seems to suggest the concern about a lack of transparency is corruption. But the importance of making sure all sides of an argument are represented has less to do with corruption and more to do with innovation.
When we prevent the people with different viewpoints from having a seat at the table when discussing these old problems, we are actively repressing the creation of new solutions.
Every discussion should be accessible to the people who can offer new perspectives or different experiences. University administrator meetings should make their decisions—budget and otherwise—accessible to Student Government and the student body. Legislative bodies should make their agendas open and accepting to the opinions of dissent and alternative viewpoints, both state and federal.
I wish someone at the pre-vote meetings in Wisconsin had asked if meeting covertly at night was a sign they were doing something wrong. Then they could have simply rescheduled their vote for later in the week, invited the democratic senators back for further discussions and taken a vote they still would have won. Hopefully, our own leaders will learn from Wisconsin’s mistakes.
