This year’s Student Association president, Adam Amit, echoed his predecessor’s words this week when he said “The SA is for every student,” but we think the students deserve to hear something more than the same old song.
We applaud the Student Association’s decision to correct the mistakes made last year by writing a new code of conduct (see Page 1). Though this is definitely a step in the right direction, the SA still has a long way to go to regain students’ trust.
The SA is the single most important student group on campus, ideally responsible for representing the interests of the entire student body, not to mention managing a huge amount of money. It was embarrassing to have the students we elected to fill these positions using racial slurs, calling the police on one another and generally acting like children. The memories of last year’s mishaps are still fresh for most of the student body. Though it would be unfair to hold the new e-board responsible for the mistakes of the old one, we’re not convinced similar situations won’t arise again this year.
We’re not expecting perfection, but a specific strategy for making sure the SA maintains a system of functionality, responsibility and accountability this year would be nice – and acting like a “family” may not be the best route for success.
The SA should not be like a family or a group of friends, complete with fighting and the occasional screaming match. They should be a team – a word SA President Adam Amit used – collectively working for our best interests. We elected them to be professionals, and this means keeping their personal lives out of the office.
Platitudes such as “An SA for Everyone” aren’t the answer, and we’ve lost patience after hearing them over and over again, and not seeing any changes. There has to be a system of accountability to ensure that mistakes and conflicts are promptly corrected or resolved, which we hope will be established with the new code of conduct. Informal agreements are how such matters were handled last year, and we’ve all seen that’s not good enough.
We definitely admire the hopes and goals of Amit and this year’s e-board, but we admired them last year and the year before that, and the year before that. This year’s group has to step up big time to negate the inappropriate happenings of last semester, and the SA owes students more than words.