What has the Freshman Class Council done this year? Not a whole lot. They organized one event in the fall, Retro Night (for which they paid $955), only to cancel it. The other event they’ve done was cosponsored with Junior Class Council, but the junior class seemingly made most of the effort to actually run it. The freshmen footed about a third of the bill. Now they’re supposedly planning a ski trip, but it’s too little, too late.
Student Union execs have tried cajoling the freshman council into getting something accomplished, with limited success. The freshmen did not show up to a mentoring session on how to run a class council. They’ve also missed several Joint Class Council meetings.
Yisrael Katz, Samantha Sacks and Stephanie Purisch, respectively president, treasurer and internal VP of the Class of 2008, said they didn’t even know about the mentoring session. Katz also cited a lack of mentoring from the start, including a lack of explanation about how SU works, how to reserve meeting space, and other administrative trivia. “We were very frustrated with the whole system,” he said. “We had no idea what we were supposed to do.”
The procedures are spelled out in a manual titled “How Things Work,” which was given to all SU officials. “It’s not rocket science,” agreed Pam Bookbinder, head of the Joint Class Council. Indeed, the Class of 2007 put on a dozen or so events their freshman year.
And that mentoring meeting that Katz, Sacks and Purisch said they didn’t know about? All 15 other class council officers showed, and Bookbinder said she even told Purisch and Sacks about the meeting in person the night before. Purisch said she remembered Bookbinder telling her of some sort of meeting, but could not specifically identify it as a mentoring session. To be fair, Bookbinder was unable to find the email she sent out to the freshmen officers informing them of the mentoring.
We’re sympathetic to the fact that freshmen are still getting their bearings on campus, and navigating SU isn’t exactly intuitive. And Katz said he realizes that none of these difficulties absolve his council of responsibility to put on events.
There’s so little time left in the year that removing the current officers and installing new ones would be more trouble than it’s worth. But, as SU President David Ader reminded, “Elections are just around the corner.”
Already, a rival slate has organized to challenge the current Class of 2008 officers. Led by A.J. Singletary, now an SU Senator, the slate has been meeting for a month already to discuss campaign strategy and what they could do in office. They deserve to be seriously considered for office come the March elections.
It’s hardly clear that keeping the current leadership is the best course of action for the Class of 2008. The current officers need to prove they’ve learned from their mistakes and that they’re not just in SU for the r‚sum‚ item; the challengers need to demonstrate how they can avoid the learning curve that plagued the current slate.