Binghamton University should establish a public forum on campus to address student concerns directly and officially. The administration has continued in its efforts to become a progressive university and accommodate a wider range of people, such as nursing mothers with the creation of a lactation room, or helping students who prefer gender-neutral housing. Despite these efforts, the University has yet to give students an official outlet to address and organize their concerns.

Applications like Yik Yak and the Bing-U Secrets Facebook page serve as unofficial forums for students to discuss problems on campus. In most cases, these outlets don’t carry any pull in dictating University policy. How many times have you read a highly upvoted Yik Yak post that brought up a valid concern, such as the horrible parking situation in Dickinson, and asked yourself why this was not being addressed?

While protests and rallies serve as mediums by which students can communicate messages to the school administration, many students do not have the time to organize or participate in such events. These students still need a place to make their opinions heard.

Some universities have recognized the limited options available to students to voice concerns and have implemented public forums to encourage discourse. If Binghamton truly considers itself a progressive public university, the creation of an official online forum for students should be a no-brainer. The public forum would also serve to further the image of Binghamton University as a bastion for free discourse and speech in the college community.

The difficulties of deciding on the proper model is the only obstacle in its implementation. The University must devise a way to prevent inflammatory remarks on such a forum. The easy solution is to allow students to post only if they agree to disclose their identities.

Anonymity allows users to shirk the consequences of their words. Real identities put faces to concerns. This facilitates in-person discussion as people interested in the issue at hand seek each other out and organize. Not only would an online forum help students voice concerns, but it could potentially create new student activist groups.

The forum could then follow the Yik Yak model and allow users to upvote and push important issues to the top of the list. The school administration could then address concerns in order of student consensus. Unlike Yik Yak, there would not be a downvote option. The downvote option is used as a way to delete unpopular yaks. Since the administration is already monitoring the posts, it should not be difficult to clean and manage the forums.

Giving the students another avenue to voice opinions will strengthen the campus community and allow issues to be tackled quickly and fairly.