It has been said that the Student Government Association doesn’t care the slightest about the students, but instead, only about its resumes. This has been said, likely and by most accounts, since the inception of “Student Government Associations,” whatever those are, really.
There are a few reasons for this. For the most part, students don’t really care that much about the issues the SGA talks about amongst themselves. They don’t care about the pats on the back that senators and treasurers and presidents and vice presidents give each other. They care about laundry, they care about not having to give money to the school so they can buy food and beer, they care about narrow minded things.
The laundry problem hasn’t been fixed. The SGA, no matter how much they talk about fee increases and decreases, won’t change a thing. The SGA is, to make an accurate comparison, worth as much as a child playing house by themselves in a plastic kitchen with plastic food and plastic utensils.
But for the first time, they actually did something the students wanted. After how many years, I have no idea besides far too many, they finally passed online voting. And they deserve, for that, a big “hip, hip hooray!”
Hip hip, hooray!
To celebrate this, as I’m sure many other students did, I went out and didn’t vote. And by that, I mean I didn’t go online and click a button.
It could be apathy. It could be laziness. It could be absolutely nothing. I don’t even care why I didn’t, why most of the people I know didn’t, and why I predict the voting turnout won’t be much higher than years previous which went without online voting.
Kurt Vonnegut, in his book “A Man Without a Country,” shares an insight which seems too true to be funny: “There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be President.”
That doesn’t implicate only those who want to be President of the United States, but those who wish to be in positions of power – no matter how pseudo-powerful they are – in government, whether local or at a university.
Now, that wouldn’t be entirely bad if that were the only thing. After all, there is always a little charm or genius in the mad and the crazy. But unfortunately, we are not dealing with pictures, art or words. If I was able to see a pretty craypas painting, or a small little prose piece, that would be fine.
But I’m not. What I’m seeing is a bunch of people who talk about grown up matters and deal with them in childish ways. They try to craft our university when they couldn’t craft a pot if they were in pottery class.
Even though they finally passed online voting, doing so only after the tiring years of trying to keep the people they knew in, they are still useless. The online voting just makes it so a few more people can contribute to the useless institution of student government. Instead of only a couple percent of people caring, they might get a few percent.
The problems we are facing as students, whether it is fee increases, dealing new contracts with the companies that control the laundry machines or the recent sexual abuse scandals and what should be done about them, are all at a level that is solvable only through administration. For other things, like the dealing of funds to Registered Student Organizations, we have seen the fraud and pocketing into friends that has happened.
It seems, then, only sensical that these issues be put to the people who can do them effectively, with grace, and with experience: the administration.
There is no check and balance by having a SGA and an administration. There is only students, playing games with themselves, gaining recognition on their resume, all for doing nothing but wasting their time.
And that, I would say, is a waste of time for all of us. If some young adults want to play house, they can find a kid to babysit.
Ben Moriarty is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Annoyed with SGA'ers • Mar 11, 2010 at 10:31 am
I think he is criticizing the literal existence of the SGA. He doesn’t see a need for it because he thinks the administration is best suited to solve the problems the SGA can’t.
Even if there was a need for the SGA, he clearly is making the point that it is so ineffective it can be done away with anyhow.
That’s the argument. Twisting his words on how he chose to present his point doesn’t prove that the SGA is needed.
Also, shifting the argument to he shouldn’t knock the SGA’s online elections when the Collegian is online is silly. They have literally nothing to do with one another. He never knocked online elections per se, he just said the obvious which is online elections don’t change the relevance of the SGA.
I love your comment though Elie, “You seem to have been carried away with your disdain to the extent of eradicating any justification for your disdain, and this is reflected in the article?s superfluous preponderance of analogy.” Hahaha what percentage of students who read that comment know what that sentence means? Awesome.
Ed Cutting • Mar 10, 2010 at 10:15 pm
What no one realizes about the washing machines is that the problem is caused by the fact that they are a major cash cow for Whitmore. 60.2% of the money goes directly to the VC Cultural Enrichment Fund.
What this means is that the vendor doesn’t get enough money to make it worthwhile to (a) really have a lot of machines on campus or (b) repair them to the extent they ought to be. And there has long been a proposal to have an actual laundrymat in the dining commons that isn’t a dining commons anymore in Southwest – which comes to naught because of the slush fund efforts.
The same thing is true of the soda and candy machines. Don’t know the percentage on those, though.
Elie Feinstein • Mar 10, 2010 at 9:37 am
Seeing as Derek touched on the SGA’s affinity with negligence and corruption, I’ll address the overall incoherence of your argument.
Most importantly, you contradict yourself. On the one hand, you claim the SGA doesn’t care about students at all, that it doesn’t adequately respond to student issues, and that when it actually does try to tackle “grown up matters” it does so “in childish ways.” I can certainly understand where you’re coming from when you say this, although I in many ways disagree. On the other hand, you claim that all important student issues are “at a level that is solvable only through administration.”
So, essentially you’re bashing the SGA for not acting in its capacity to solve student issues even though the SGA has no such capacity? It seems the strength of whatever arguments you have in your arsenal is severed by the disjointed nature of the piece. You seem to have been carried away with your disdain to the extent of eradicating any justification for your disdain, and this is reflected in the article’s superfluous preponderance of analogy.
Furthermore, it seems strange to me that you would disparage the value of online elections while the Collegian, for which you write, is gradually shifting toward a predominantly online presence. And no, moving online is not just about the money.
David Robertson • Mar 10, 2010 at 2:01 am
I am not sure what you mean, or your collegian fellows, when you say the laundry issue hasn’t been fixed. Every machine on campus is new, I made sure that they placed more in each building, that maintenance time was shortened if the machines broke, and did it all without raising the prices. What more could one ask for? What problems are left?
So in short, if there was something, don’t blame me. I literally accomplished everything that was asked of me, it was apathetic people like you who didn’t convey their issues that are now bellyaching.
Derek Khanna • Mar 10, 2010 at 1:17 am
I will not disagree that the SGA’s conduct in years past has been shameful. I have led the charge against them and their illegal activities, and misuse of public funds (http://umass-sga.com/downloads/t-shirt%20complaint.doc).
However, the administration is the one that thinks the police are doing a fine job and the the Code of Student Conduct is AOK. The SGA has “primary responsibility” over the CSC, and is 40% of the Police Advisory Board which I helped reconstitute. The SGA can have a positive role her to play. The Administration is actually made up of committees, these committees have spots for students that SGA members are required to fill.
In years past, the SGA has taken $2,000,000 and used it as a slush fund of political activities… and there still are problems. But this problem is because of people like yourself who never voted to “vote the bums out” and because the media has never accurately portrayed what is actually happening in the Student Government. This year there have been major systematic reforms to the SGA, not nearly enough and everyone was hard fought, but the SGA can serve a valuable purpose on this campus.
And as to whom to vote for, you remarked that online voting was important, Pat Kenney voted against it three times in committee trying to make sure it would never hit the floor. The choice is clear.
There has been one administration that has run the SGA for 8 years, and people wonder why it sucked… it sucks because it’s the same people as last year! I feel like I’m taking crazy pills… DON”T VOTE FOR THE SAME PEOPLE AND EXPECT DIFFERENT RESULTS that’s the definition of crazy according to Albert Einstein. Ngozi, our currently inept President who thought that the SGA stealing student funds was A OK, is running Kenney’s campaign… so what type of a candidate do you think he’ll be like? Throw the bums out!