campus views: Student society squabbling
Agnes Gulbinowicz, Opinions Editor
The Simon Fraser Student Society. Your Simon Fraser Student Society collects fees from you and exists to serve you. A couple of weeks ago I scoured the campus for the weekly "Peak Speak" segment in the opinions section and asked students whether they paid attention to the student society.
The majority of people said that they did not pay attention to the SFSS and some said they didn't even know it existed. Admittedly, the survey had a completely unrepresentative sample of five and the results were totally invalid and unreliable - but I have a sneaking suspicion that I did not just happen upon the only five people on campus who feel this way.
Until I became the associate news editor at The Peak last September, I also hardly paid attention to the SFSS. The extent of my involvement included admiring the colourful posters that were put up around campus every April during election time.
As soon as I was thrown into the world of student journalism, however, I was also thrown into the world of covering student politics and I suddenly had to pay attention - it was my job.
And as with most things, as soon as I started paying attention I learned that all my previous assumptions about student politics and student politicians were entirely false.
I quickly realised that the people running our student government (and its $1.5 million budget) were not the most qualified people for the job. They were just the people who thought they were the most qualified at election time.
This year's incarnation of the SFSS is no different. And if you ask them, they'll tell you. They're getting away with stupid decisons. They're not doing everything they should be for the students. And they don't really get along - in some cases they barely respect one another.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that the board of directors hardly communicate with one another. Yes, they hold a weekly meeting and yes, they provide monthly reports to one another about their activities, but they still seem surprisingly in the dark about what their co-directors are doing.
I repeatedly heard exclamations of "What does that mean?!" and "What came out of that meeting?!" while I watched one director look over a vague list of activities in a co-worker's report for the month of September.
If student society members themselves have no clue about what is happening within their own organisation, it is not surprising that students are barely aware that it exists.
Another problem seems to be that SFSS directors are unwilling to delve into conflict with one another. For all the objections to the work report, the director I was with also admitted to never questioning and clarifying other directors' activities.
There are plenty of snarky comments to go around and many an eye has been rolled - I have been made privy to much of this complaining. But they seem unwilling to bring this complaining inwards and turn it into constructive criticism of each other.
Instead, professional differences of opinion are kept quiet and turn into personal grudges. These in turn become personal crusades to disapprove of everything the disliked directors are doing. As a result, the entire student society is stalled.
Trivial personal differences take precedence over actual student society matters - like real discusssion of whether the SFSS should defederate from the Canadian Student Federation, whether students at satellite campuses such as Kamloops and Surrey are being adequately represented and what the SFSS really wants to get done if they ever achieve a quorated Annual General Meeting.
The SFSS exists to serve you -- in theory. Right now it seems to exist to serve the egos of its board of directors. I don't blame you for not paying attention to their petty squabbling. But maybe if you did, they would stop.