I’ve been dodging Breezeway politics for a few years now, but occasionally somebody involved in student politics e-mails me with a question or update, and I invariably offer my sympathy.
But this time, they asked for money. It got my attention. And here I am, reading the Oregon Daily Emerald online, and it’s a little like reading a scrapbook of three years ago.
All the same names are here. All the same issues are repeated using all the same arguments. None of it gets to the larger issue.
Every year, 10 percent of the students at the University vote in campus elections. Ten percent of those run around making posters and phone calls and filing grievances against a process that 90 percent of students ignore.
The Emerald and the Oregon Commentator, faithful to that one percent, lionize that process, making impassioned editorial pleas to reason and duty. It’s very quaint.
The truth is, students get screwed every term for a few hundred bucks, of which only a third goes to about 150 student groups that do little. Granted, magazines and newspapers publish, the Student Senate meets and debates being “proactive” or spending others’ money, and a few ethnic student unions hold functions that commemorate things secular yet still sacred.
Real corruption takes place with the rest of the money in the Athletic Department and EMU. But local major media outlets will likely dedicate zero stories to the gross apathy that administrators of truly costly programs exhibit every year.
While it is pathetic that the system has not been able to mandate that all programs receiving funding publish line item allocation requests as part of their budgets, it is worse that the Oregon University System does not make accountable deans and department heads who spend millions.
While it is sad that OSPIRG gets $8 a year from every student on campus and reallocates it nationwide so anti-OSPIRG forces can properly (and probably illegally) be defeated, it’s horrifying that no one cares.
There is a part of me that believes the stage for civil servant behavior is set here, at the University; student governors learn bad behavior on a small stipend before they become real governors and engage in flagrant and felonious behavior.
But there is a part of me that worries more about students learning not to vote. All the grievances and injunctions in the world will not stop the average student from taking one look at Scott Austin or Ben Unger and thinking, “God, what a geek.”
We should tell the truth about what this student fee process is: It’s a joke. The ongoing election debacles could be solved by common sense and the faintly unsettling revelation that no one cares. Everyone involved should gather into a huddle to chant, “Get over yourself.”
If you want students to vote, tell them why. If it sounds even the slightest bit absurd when you say it, imagine how it sounds when they hear it.
Students should hear about real issues: rising tuition costs, lack of available campus parking, unnecessary and ill-conceived construction, what scary people in the state Legislature want to do to your education, and what very frightening people in Congress want to do to your student loans.
Students should be able to expect that.