Minnesota State University Reporter

Issue date: 2/12/08 Section: Voices

I remember standing on the MSU mall almost two years ago during an open forum about - you guessed it - campus recreation and athletics. Two years later, administration has finally taken the hint. The staggering $21.7 million figure proposed then for features ridiculous in both their cost and absolute lack of necessity, has been shaved down to a much more reasonable $8.48 million. I can live with that. I would still much rather see this amount go toward something of academic value, but I digress.

My beef now is not the proposal itself, but the way in which administration members feebly grasped for reasons as to why they believe students will support this proposal any more than they have previous proposals.

Sen. Abbie Hill asked a legitimate question at Wednesday's senate meeting: "Can you please tell me what new evidence you have that says that the majority of students support this proposal?"

After a palpable five seconds of gaping mouths and eyes on behalf of President Richard Davenport, Richard Straka, Patricia Swatfager-Haney and Todd Pfingsten, Straka said they'd never claimed to have had such evidence. Had you been there, as I was, you would have realized the hilarity of Straka's statement.

Mere minutes before, Straka indicated that the April 12 editorial was the "voice of the student body." The editorial had pleaded with administration not to give up on the recently voted down campus rec proposal: "The students have spoken. They said no to the campus recreation proposal. But it's not like it was resounding. So please, go back to the drawing board, campus recreation," it stated.

Following Hill's question, Straka once again gave this editorial as evidence for student support. That, as well as a committee including all of five students.

I wonder if this editorial had endorsed the opposite view if it would have been used as such heavy evidence; touted as "voice of the people."

If this claim had any substance or element of objectivity whatsoever, Straka certainly should have been able to dig up a plethora of letters to the editor written by regular students praising actions taken by the administration rather than one editorial.

What makes the Reporter representative of the student body is not the one person or people who write the editorial. It's found mostly in what students say in Pulse, Letters to the Editor or within the news, sports and variety stories we write. If we're doing our job, this publication is representative of the different views you, the readers, hold. We don't believe, and nor should administration when convenient for them, that the "voice of the people" is issued from any one of us.

Truth be told, there is no one voice that could ever represent even our meager staff. The very idea is insulting. Like you, we all have our own values, beliefs and opinions. Sometimes these views coincide. Other times they clash. The point is, we work together to find common ground. A lot of the time, we're already standing on it.

Like you, we work together for a common goal. While yours and those whom you work with may differ from us only in a matter of what this goal is, everyone at this university is here to earn an education and become prepared for a career.

The goal of our administration should be to provide us with the tools to make this possible.

Next time one of them - or anyone for that matter - wants to use the Reporter as an example of "voice of the people," they shouldn't page through it to find one particular writer or title coinciding with their own agenda. Rather than reading the opinion of one of us, read about the students all of us work together to represent.


Rachel Heiderscheidt is the Reporter news editor

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools