During the frantic and frightfully brief campus campaign season,candidates showcased their leadership credentials and legislativeplans. Last week’s endorsement editorial gave little emphasisto ideas for improving SMU, since Ed Board reasoned that theseproposals were less exclusive to one candidate than his or herleadership ability.
A great idea for legislation might be shared and exchanged byevery senator, but well-developed interpersonal skills cannot betransferred by word-of-mouth.
This criterion does not imply that Ed Board is deaf tooutstanding legislative plans. While interviewing the candidatesfor president, vice president and secretary, several ideas wereexpressed that should be developed and implemented immediately.
Gabe Travers discussed the possibility of a 24-hour library orstudy facility, a topic which was the subject of two editorialslast semester. According to Travers’ research, such afacility is available at all of SMU’s benchmark schools. InNovember, Gillian M. McCombs, Dean and Director of CentralUniversity Libraries, alerted Ed Board that the library isoperating under a $165,000 shortfall, and thus, expanding hours ispresently infeasible. Nonetheless, Ed Board hopes that StudentSenate continues to pursue methods of achieving this desirablegoal.
Many candidates expressed an interest in improvingcommunications between Senate and the student body. All Senatemeetings are open to the public and have a speakers’ forum,during which any member of the SMU community is free to sharethoughts and opinions.
However, more convenient means of interacting with Senate wouldbenefit the student body, so we were very pleased to hear talk of arevamped Web site and a stronger connection with The DailyCampus. The former suggestion might be accomplished by adding asecond communications chairperson, an idea of Katie Walton’s.In the opinion of Ed Board, the lack of Senate information inThe Daily Campus is the fault of the DC staff, which must doa better job of covering Senate and committee meetings.
Several candidates also championed scholarship indexing.Students are seeing their scholarships decline in value as tuitionrises, and many senators believe that the budget could be reworkedto base all SMU scholarships on a percentage of tuition.
Naturally, we are happy that Senate is working to provideadditional scholarship money for students. The biggest difficultyis finding the money to accomplish such an expensive feat,especially when budget deficits are necessitating the very tuitionhikes that would trigger scholarship increases.
A good place to begin the search would be the athleticdepartment.
