New Year’s resolutions often are necessitated by a general lack of will and initiative in the rest of the year to accomplish a clearly needed improvement in one’s situation. The same is true in the University community, and thus it is the appropriate time for all parties to make clear resolutions for the coming year.
The Emerald editorial board could stand to look at issues from a more centrist point of view. Good people can have bad opinions, and that problem is amplified by access to a pervasive medium.
For student government, it would seem prudent to continue to improve ASUO outreach while holding a respectable election this year, as opposed to the debacle and acrimony of the past several years. While college is supposed to provide a scaled-down version of real life, the University is also supposed to play the role of ideal environment, in which differing ideas are discussed, debated and decided before a voting body.
For the average student, there are so many ways one could focus energy to improve daily life. Whether that’s learning to drink less and study more or, for a few bashful types, vice versa, balancing social life and academic life always seems to be a skill in high demand but infrequent in practice.
For the activist student on the go, perhaps an appropriate resolution would be to use a bit more moderation and a little more consideration for those around you. The high-intensity, high-pitch, highly obnoxious voice many perennial protesters use turns off a great many who would otherwise at least entertain the broad strokes of the liberal movement you push. Or you could at least accept that others can disagree without being corrupt. However, we all know that no such maturity will be exhibited from dissident students because nowhere in America — least of all this small bastion of socialism — do self-righteous liberals demonstrate such levelheaded political discourse.
As for Nike CEO Phil Knight, perhaps a resolution would be to once again rejoin the University community, of which he is a highly esteemed and generous member, and realize that while attention is now given to those who are critical of him, he will ultimately be seen by history as a tremendous benefactor to the school and its athletic program. History, as we all know, is written by the victors, and in this case pragmatism and cooler heads will see that Knight, and not his oh-so-ideological detractors, improved the University’s lot the most.
For those in the local community who have to deal with the University and its unique set of challenges, the resolution should simply be to treat students like any other reasonable constituency. The representative for the University district on the Eugene City Council, Bonny Bettman, doesn’t seem to particularly care for students, and the chief of police instructs Eugene’s “Mediocre” to harass local parties and get jacked up in riot gear every Halloween. Such provocative measures are completely unnecessary but will most likely not change.
For the school’s administration, the resolution is a trickier matter. Because, as will be discussed in a moment, there is no real chance that they will tackle the biggest improvement of all — a dramatic overhaul of the education process at the University — the resolution should be something that is easy to carry out and even easier to remember. The administration this year should adopt the physician’s oath: Do no harm. Don’t scorn critical donors, don’t blindly join any under-prepared, over-hyped socially progressive organizations and don’t lose out on the Bend expansion effort.
A more grandiose resolution would be the idea that education — the only major aspect of American life not to undergo a fundamental revolution in the last hundred years — must be overhauled to improve and revitalize instruction for University students. The experience has become stagnant and the University has largely turned into a vocational school where students no longer attend to develop passion for civic growth, but instead check in for four years to obtain a degree in a field in which they will likely not end up working.
As for myself, I resolve to continue as a lone voice in the woods.