There’s one thing in the student government that our elected representatives all agree on – the Students’ Association is in shambles. In his state of the SA speech yesterday, SA president Lonny Mallach focused much of his time to discussing how to restructure student government in order to make it run more effectively.
As of late, the student government has been plagued by infighting and structural problems, which the most recent senate election highlighted.
The problem does not lie within the SA Constitution – the bylaws place branches of the student government in direct conflict with each other. There is a great deal of redundancy concerning senate and cabinet committees, and there are very few boundaries between jurisdictions.
It is clear that the only way that the student government can ever hope to have any credibilty is to restructure itself.
Mallach is going about this the right way, as well. Through working with the students by collecting their signatures – a goal that should be the centerpiece of every branch of student government — students will be given the choice of whether to keep the current senate limping along or to try to create a system that works.
Mallach’s call for open door meetings during this period of transistion should be praised, as well. These meetings should be widely publicized, so students can have a say in how their new government will be formed.
Unquestionably, this will require a great deal of work, and, depending on who will be elected to the SA presidency, this effort can either be productive or distructive. Assuming the petition succeeds, leaders of student government and SA groups, the Deans’ Advisory Committee and administrators all need to take a proactive stance in order to form a student government that both reflects all of the student body, as well as gets students actively involved with the SA government.
Mallach’s administration has enacted many positive changes, but its greatest challenge lies ahead in starting the process toward a new structure. If the student government has any hope of succeeding, it must capitalize on its ability to get students involved in making changes in the College.
