LETTER: Student voice at USU is a joke

Dear editor,

I was a freshman here in fall of 1993, that year ASUSU debated the proposal by President Emert that USU should change to semesters. There was little public support, ASUSU and the Faculty Senate rejected the idea. It took a few years, but we’re on semesters now.

A couple of years ago the debate was a tuition increase in order to pay professors better. ASUSU passed a substantial tuition increase with the stipulation that the legislature match the increase. They didn’t, the increase didn’t go into effect.

I believe it was last year that ASUSU debated and held an election on a fee increase for a sports complex for students. The fee passed, but the complex has been held up by local political issues.

The point to all this is that the ASUSU executive council has little true power. They can be, and frequently are, vetoed, overruled, side-stepped and ignored by University administration.

I’m not saying they don’t work hard, because I know they attend a lot of meetings and sit on a lot of committees. I just think that who attends those meetings doesn’t matter much. The elected voice of the students is ignored so often that it doesn’t matter to me who that voice is, or what they say.

I choose not to vote, not because I don’t feel my vote wouldn’t make a difference in who got elected, these elections are frequently very close, but because I don’t care who gets elected.

I don’t know any of the candidates, so I don’t care who gets the tuition waiver and the resume enhancement. This is not apathy about how this University is run – I care a lot about the quality of this school. This is realism about who actually calls the shots.

So if you feel like voting, vote for the fun guy, or the one with good candy, or the one with the biggest sign, or the one with the coupon. If they can get together something like that, they can probably do a bang up job on the Howl.

Spencer Anderson