Letters to the Editor

2/17/11 6:00pm

Online Comment of the WeekIn response to "Feature: Joke candidates are no laughing matter," Feb. 4:

I served as Student Association President from 2009-2010, and I have to say that the assertion that the SA has been "inactive" or "in bed with the administration" is absurd. And to blame the SA for the decline in campus "quirkiness" doesn't make much sense to me either.

First off, the SA has been plenty busy over the last few years. Let me give one example of an area that students constantly gripe about: construction. During my entire time at Rice I heard students complain that they didn't have enough input in the planning process of future facilities on campus. So a group of us met with various administrators, including President [David] Leebron to discuss the master planning process for the university. We put together a survey to gather student input on all sorts of aspects of campus facilities (aesthetics, parking, green space, campus dynamism, sports & recreation, etc). We received great feedback on that survey, which we turned into a detailed report that we presented to the administration. The purpose of the report was to explain the general perspective of students regarding campus facilities in order to help frame future discussions over specific projects that would allow students to provide meaningful feedback and serve as constructive partners in the long term planning of the university. This project required a lot of hard work by a lot of SA representatives (we had a working group of 11 people), so to claim that the SA has been completely inactive is not only insulting to those of us who worked on that project, it is also a clear indication to me that Erik and Daniel haven't even bothered to pay attention to the regular activities of the SA during their time at Rice. If looking at future construction is "not paying attention to student needs" then what is?

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Also, during my time as president, I had plenty of disagreements with President Leebron, such as over allowing Coffeehouse to move into the [Brochstein] Pavilion and the importance of renovating the RMC to make it a more dynamic center of student life. In fact, we passed a resolution that was sent to President Leebron supporting Coffeehouse's right to submit a bid for the Pavilion and we created a Student Center Renovations Committee to bring that issue to the forefront of campus discussions. During my time as president, I tried very, very hard to make sure that university administrators at all levels recognized the importance of incorporating student input into their decision-making processes.

The SA has made a lot of strides over the last several years, and I am proud that I got the opportunity to contribute to that effort alongside a wonderful group of students who really cared passionately about making student life better. I will be the first person to admit that the SA still has a long way to go to become the powerful institution that I think it should be. But it's not easy. You have a high degree of student apathy, yearly turnover of leadership undermining continuity, and limited institutional memory and external support structures. To make matters much worse, Rice students have developed a culture that has somehow embraced the absurd notion that student governance is about the colleges vs. the SA, as if they were competing rather than complementing institutions.

A powerful SA should represent a powerful student body, and vice versa. But to do that, we need students to be involved and passionate. Recruiting interested students was always a challenge that I saw during my time working in the SA. Whenever I heard a student complaining about "the direction of the university" or lamenting the fact that the SA wasn't able to do more, my answer was always the same. If you have an opinion and you want to see change, then stop complaining and go out and do something. And if you are too lazy or too busy to do anything, then you don't have the right to complain. It's really as simple as that.

Finally, I think it's important for me to say that I absolutely agree with Erik and Daniel's premise that something has been lacking in Rice undergraduate culture in recent years. I noticed the decline during my time - Baker 13 was less popular, jacks became progressively tamer (although that's usually because the colleges themselves complained about getting jacked), Pub crowds got smaller and smaller and even the 21 year olds on our Beer Bike chug teams started drinking water because people became so obsessed with trying to win the race while forgetting it was about having fun. But those things didn't happen because there was some sort of decline in the SA structure. It's because Rice kids became too tame, too scared to take risks, too busy doing homework to go on any adventures. It really is a shame, and I do hope it changes. But you can't do that by changing the way the SA works - you can't change a culture from the top down like that. You do that by going out and getting other students to do stuff with you, and serving as an example that hopefully other people will follow. You can't manufacture a culture of quirkiness, you just do it.

Parick McAnaney

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