Students of all backgrounds should have a voice when decisions are being made.
Unfortunately, some current Student Life organizations make things extremely difficult for the average student to participate, acquire funding and generally thrive in Student Life. The small population of students who participate in these orgs do not represent a majority of students.
Theoretically, many of these positions would be voted on by the student body, but many of them end up being appointed hastily.
Many students either don’t know how the voting works or are too preoccupied with other things to pay attention to the elections.
Student Life is made up of multiple organizations, and the students in these orgs work hard, but that does not fix the institutionalized issues in their systems.
Keep in mind that no individual student or organization can be blamed for these concerns, they continue through multiple groups of students multiple administrations. This means that the system is flawed; not any one person is at fault.
However, in an Associated Student Government (ASG) meeting, students requesting money were told that they were not contributing enough money into the cost.
The contribution per student was set at $50, which may seem small in a grand scheme, but there are students who worked incredibly hard to pay any amount.
Financial aid does not always cover all expenses and a lot of students work jobs on top of going to class.
A lot of these students do not have time to participate in clubs or orgs and therefore do not have a voice in decisions. Many of them can also struggle with getting grants, loans and scholarships that they need to attend a university.
Setting the precedent that students cannot go to conferences with the support of the school unless they can contribute money from their own pocket is a rocky road that may come off as classist.
Many people in Student Life are overworked and aren’t paid enough with their stipends to be responsible for the institutionalized problems that exist, and this contributes to the fact that many of the processes and rules are elitist and inaccessible.
CMU students come from many different backgrounds and many in Student Life do not seem to understand the monetary insecurity that so many CMU students experience daily.
ASG is an organization that should represent every department and every student, but the consistent voting that is based on personal interests without consideration of their constituents makes this impossible. It can be argued that some members are more worried about making beneficial friendships for future vendettas rather than helping students. The process of asking for funding in itself burns students out, as many do not want and don’t have the time to go through brutal grilling and multiple long meetings where they are made to feel stupid.
Seeing quid pro quos and negative politics in our Student Life is disheartening. We at The Criterion would like to see student leaders who genuinely care about students and focus on helping them get great opportunities at CMU rather than arguing and creating drama.
Further, there’s a precedent that allows club funding to be removed from club accounts based on whether previous club members passed the club down correctly, which means appointing new members to positions correctly is a major part of the process. Not only is the Presence app glitchy and difficult for the average student, students also have to worry about being reprimanded if the people before them did not pass the club on correctly.
This discourages new clubs from forming and continuing clubs from meeting.
The hassle of creating and maintaining club accounts deters already busy students from the process, as they do not have time for lengthy meetings and non-responses when they do reach out.
The Programming Activities Council puts on fun activities, there is no denying that. However, their membership can be fairly exclusive, and getting feedback from students on events is difficult, which can result in events that don’t necessarily serve the average student. Getting students out to go to activities on campus is a tall order, especially given the busyness of the average student. This is a problem that many orgs face.
When considering all of these issues, it can be seen that Student Life represents a small number of students who participate in it and does not reflect the entire student body. As of Fall 2020, CMU had 8,945 students in total.
Student Life and CMU as a whole needs to figure out how to represent them properly so they can get the quality education and experience they are paying so much for.
