Last week, a group of aspiring student leaders, meeting in one of those austere Mattin Center classrooms where decisions are generally made, was thinking of ways to get your attention. They'll want you to sign petitions, flier the campus, tell your friends and maybe even vote -- but you can't.
I know, some of them may be your friends, but still, you have to stay strong. They want to be the next members of the Executive Student Council, and they usually have one motive: to add the titles to their resumes.
So, like I said, you can't just let them have your attention -- you have to make them earn it. You have questions that go unanswered nearly every day, concerns that go unresolved, and a thirst for political strength that goes unquenched, year-in, year-out.
This time of year is usually one of inane electoral rules, poorly designed posters and the kind of inept grassroots campaigning characteristic of Democratic presidential campaigns. But with your individual electoral worth (enhanced by the fact that a lot of your peers won't vote), you have the power to change that. Your vote is not automatic, and it isn't just one more notch in the bedpost of some popularity-hungry resume-builder. With your vote this year, you can force the candidates (and those who become officers) to take substantive positions on issues of genuine importance.
To get you started, here are some ideas:
3. Study Abroad
As you may have read in last week's News-Letter, the University has dismantled a popular study abroad program for the second time in little more than a year. The justifications for this decision have been financial, of course, but nonetheless dubious. If the University expects us to plunge deeper into our pockets every year, we should at least get something tangible out of it -- namely, a better and more centralized study abroad program.
This is something StuCo can easily press the administration on. In fact, word has it that the idea of establishing an office dedicated to study abroad programs -- as suggested in an editorial by the News-Letter last week -- has been kicking around for some time. Why it hasn't come to fruition yet is anybody's guess, but it's certainly something the council can focus on and, hopefully, get done.
2. Tuition
Talk to any parent about the skyrocketing cost of a Hopkins education and the response is simple: enough is enough. Every year the University gets away with hiking tuition at a rate higher than that of inflation without explaining, in even the slightest measure of detail, why.
If you can think of any other industry in which a customer exchanges money for a service without the slightest bit of knowledge as to why prices are constantly going up please, get back to me. Save for maybe your ulcer-inducing bill from Baltimore Gas & Electric every month, I can't think of any other instance in which we would allow ourselves to be so easily duped.
And yet our concerns fall on StuCo's deaf ears. As evidenced by past issues of the News-Letter that I've inspected, there was a time when the administration was expected to deliver a full and detailed report on rises in tuition to the council. Now, as you can probably imagine, the deans would get together and have a good laugh at the idea of justifying its decisions to StuCo. If that doesn't say something about the council's inefficacy, then I don't know what does.
1. Climate Change
If you watched the Academy Awards on Sunday, you know that it's now officially cool to be active in the fight against climate change. Add to that the fact that our campus already has a vigorous student watchdog group -- the Hopkins Energy Action Team -- that has allied itself quickly with other student organizations, and you have a political climate that's ready for radical change.
And yet, StuCo has done nothing. Just a few weeks ago, HEAT submitted for the council's consideration a sensible and much-needed proposal on how to reduce the university's contributions to global warming. The proposal called on the university to become carbon-neutral by 2015, and presented StuCo with a rare opportunity to do something substantive.
So what did the council do? It closed its doors, sank the resolution and left HEAT with little to go on. In fact, some of the proposal's leading detractors wrote in to the News-Letter to defend their votes by agreeing with Sen. James Inhofe, the crusading anti-science Oklahoman who thinks global warming is about as realistic as the latest plot twist on Lost.
Seventy colleges and universities, including peers like the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell, have signed on to the Presidents Climate Commitment and pledged to reduce their carbon emissions to zero. We should be ashamed at Hopkins' inability to provide scientific and political leadership on this issue, and at StuCo's inability to force it.
Encouraging just one of the many candidates who will come to you for a signature or ask you for your vote to take positions on these issues (and then actually follow through) would be a good first step toward making your student government more responsive to your needs. Then, maybe, can you flyer the campus and tell all your friends.
