Who cares who the next president of Binghamton University will be? I’m only here for one more year, and an interim president will probably lead the administration for most of next year. So the decades-long reign of Binghamton’s next president won’t affect me, right?

Wrong. As the Binghamton University Alumni Association’s banner above the stage during Girl Talk’s concert at Spring Fling showed, while we’re only students briefly, we’re alumni for a lifetime.

Judging by history, the next president of the University will determine the direction of Binghamton’s growth for the next 20 years. The educational approach supported by the new president will determine the future reputation of our alma mater-to-be.

President Lois DeFleur had an obvious goal. She dubbed BU the ‘crown jewel’ of the SUNY system, then took action to further the fragmentation and specialization of individual departments while hurtling our athletic program into Division I.

The reputation of the school increased, at first. Specialized departments allowed the University to churn out degrees in engineering, business and the sciences, and the athletics overhaul provided the school with free advertising in the form of positive press.

As the ratings went up, however, the educational quality deteriorated. Apathy is a social norm among students, but it was not always this way. Universities used to be centers of learning, where students would engage in multi-faceted discussions among their peers informed by the various classes to which they were exposed. This isn’t so much the case anymore.

As an English major, have you ever tried to have a serious academic discussion with an engineer? What about the economics major with the biochemistry major? What about someone from SOM? Where there is no overlap, it’s difficult to find common ground for deliberative discussion ‘ the original purpose for the American public education system.

In the business world, for example, much of the responsibilities you will assume require on-the-job training, regardless of whether you were involved in an undergraduate business program or not.

What, then, is the purpose of our undergraduate education? Our apathetic generation views education as necessary simply to obtain a piece of paper, the degree. The result is individuals who play the undergraduate system to produce the best-looking piece of paper possible. It seems the majority view is no longer that education is good, in itself, or that education provides students with particular perspectives on how to live their lives.

The return of the prominence of small liberal arts schools demonstrates a reactionary response to the framing of education that Binghamton perpetuates.

So if you believe undergraduate education should be more about perspective than preparing you to be an efficient human resource for a particular company, you should care about the choice of our next president.

However, many support President DeFleur’s policies and goals. If you attended this University primarily because of its rank, rather than economic reasons, then you have voted for her policies with your feet.

But I, for one, think that the system by which we rate educational institutions is in dire need of reform. There is a drastic difference between research universities and teaching universities. The former best suits graduate and doctorate students, whereas the latter best suits undergraduates. As a current undergraduate, I believe that the next administration should take steps to restore the liberal arts foundations originally laid down by Harpur College.

The most important point, however, is the following: Whoever is selected as the next president for your alma mater will have an impact on your life, whether you acknowledge it or not. Apathy toward an issue does not prevent it from affecting your life ‘ ignoring a problem never makes that problem go away.