Editorial
SA meetings need purpose
By Editorial Staff
April 24, 2015
Student Assembly has a lot to do. It funds campus organizations, makes student life active and interesting for all, and helps connect the student body to the administration. The group has a lot to do and needs to use its time and resources wisely. While serving as a representative body specifically, members of the Assembly should not use the forum to complain about trivial issues or rehash old questions and policy changes that were long ago decided. Student Assembly has and can be a great resource and platform to improve student life, but recently its meetings have been hijacked by unnecessary campaigns and personal gripes with the administrations.
This week’s Student Assembly meeting exemplifies the recent spate of individual grievances and misunderstanding. While the minutes did demonstrate productive discussions about the AIDS Hike for Life and Cram and Scram Changes, they also showed how Student Assembly representatives use their position for personal thoughts and musings. The most obvious example came during the discussion surrounding last week’s bomb threat and shelter-in place. Although the minutes cannot encompass everything that is said, we assume that their secretary reports the meeting’s general content accurately. This week representatives showed a lack of forethought and simple investigation. Many, if not all, of the questions presented during the meeting were answered in last week’s issue of The Spectator: from questions about closing the roads to evacuation procedures. While everyone posed important questions about Monday’s events, is Student Assembly really the correct forum for them? Hamilton Emergency Response Team (HERT) and the State Police held a meeting immediately following the events to discuss changes and feedback. HERT has also received hundreds of emails and continues to welcome feedback. Yet, ignoring all the previously answered questions and re-hashed debates, Student Assembly felt the need to have their own discussion about this issue, and one which overly humored members who clearly had not done some basic homework.
Additionally, Student Assembly continues to write and propose resolutions concerning other, already discussed and decided, elements of student life. Just this month, the group entertained a conversation about the discontinuation of off-campus housing for nearly their entire session. While the senior members of Student Assembly tried in vain to tell the room that these conversations were had first in 1995 and last in 2011, the group forged ahead questioning the rationale, transparency and equity of these decisions. While it is encouraging that younger members of the student body care about such sweeping policy changes, the older members should focus the organization’s energy in a more productive manner. Our campus has many questions left to solve, humoring a twenty-year old debate makes a mockery of their time and purpose.
Student Assembly provides a vital connection from the student body to the administration, but time and again they choose the wrong battles to bicker over and fail to discuss or solve substantive issues. The group needs to stop humoring members who have not done their homework or who fail to respect the decisions of others, and they need to begin setting agendas about unsolved problems that could benefit from the input of an engaged and intelligent group like themselves.