Earlier this week, at their ceremonial first meeting, Mayor Miller addressed the newly elected Student Senate about their capacity to reinstate the Senate Environment Committee (EC) next year as an operational Standing Committee. Many of the new senators may have never heard about this issue beforehand, but they will soon realize how much of a difference they have the opportunity to make in the senate. Despite the propaganda from the former senate members, many of next year’s members will soon learn that the Student Issues Committee has simply been revamped and renamed the Student Concerns Committee. This committee will consist of a chair and two vice-chairs to work on environmental and diversity “student concerns,” among others, but will not even be labeled as such (e.g. environment vice-chair) nor be obligated to carry on any of the former committee’s responsibilities or commitments.
The architects of this change have argued that the EC has a negligible role in Senate and the university as a whole and have suggested that awareness of environmental issues could simply be promulgated by the SMU Environmental Society. In reality, the Environment Committee serves many critical functions, one of the most important being a liaison to the Campus Planning and Operations Department consisting of the Energy Management, Custodial Services and Purchasing divisions. In fact, the SMU environmental manager and the director of energy management at SMU both came to the senate meeting the day of this pivotal vote and avowed their support and desire to have a university-backed environmental committee to work with. Moreover, the EC had, for the most part, already passed on the torch of environmental event organizing (for Texas Recycles Day, etc.), to the now more active SMU Environmental Society as of fall 2005, so that the EC could concentrate on maintaining what it had already established.
The Student Senate has now castrated itself. Not only did it recently ban itself from doing any kind of “programming,” which isn’t a stretch now that there is no Diversity or Environment Committee, but the temporary committee formed to write the bylaws of the new Student Concerns Committee rejected the current EC chair’s attempt to transfer some EC responsibilities into the Student Concerns Committee bylaws. The Student Senate is officially telling the student body that anything more than simply encouraging environmentally friendly practices on campus is not their problem anymore.
The senate’s so-called leadership has won this fight so far because they have oversimplified this as merely a change in emphasis…that is, concentrating the new committee on policy and leaving “programming” up to the SMU Environmental Society. Yet, before they voted on this measure, they conveniently avoided explaining what they thought constituted “programming,” which we now know to include the maintenance of the campus recycling programs that were created and implemented by the EC. So not only did they do away with the EC, but they don’t even care what will happen to the campus recycling programs that will be left unattended, assuming the SMU Environmental Society doesn’t succumb to the senate’s coercion and divert their limited resources to these programs.
Concentrating on “policy” sounds nice, but in practice, the past environmental policy recommendations passed by the senate were agreed to by the SMU administrators because they knew that the EC was committed to seeing things through and would not give up if initially rejected. Without a clear purpose and direction, it is doubtful that the Student Concerns Committee would be persistent and aggressive enough on an environmental issue of interest or that it will garner nearly as much respect on campus as the EC.
The Student Senate is simply abandoning the EC’s initiatives in the name of “structure,” which will soon be reduced to ashes because these programs were designed by the Campus Planning & Operations Department (in conjunction with the EC) under the assumption that the EC would be there to promote, monitor and maintain certain aspects of them.
The result of this will likely be the end of environmental awareness bulletin boards in residence halls, breakdown of the stake sign advertisement system that the EC and Campus Grounds Crew maintain and degradation of the classroom and hallway recycling because there will no longer be anyone to replace the labels and monitor the bins.
Furthermore, one of the most respected and lauded student efforts, the Boulevard Recycling Program, was set up from the beginning by the EC and SMU Environmental Manager Robert Taylor to be administered by the EC. Yet, the Senate has not even asked Mr. Taylor if the program can continue without a university backed student committee to manage it, which is likely due to the fact that they already know the answer and don’t care.
All of this began when the Senate Research and Recommendations Committee was set up as an ad hoc committee in the fall of 2005 and conveniently waited till after I left to wage their war on the EC. If that isn’t an enough of an indictment against this plan, they claimed that the current Environment and Diversity Committee members would not mind this so-called “consolidation” and would want to join the Student Concerns Committee, making it a grand uber-committee of vast human and financial resources. Even if you don’t mind that this is a very risky (or reckless) way of trying to make the senate more efficient, their unfounded assumption of indifferent committee members has already been proven wrong by the fact that, according to the current EC Chair, the EC members have been demoralized and have not shown up to a single meeting this semester. And to top it off, the Senate appropriated a mere $40 annual budget to this new super committee, which is less than 6 percent of the EC’s last budget.
That said, the Sustainability Endowments Institute has published the first college sustainability report in the U.S. ever to mention SMU, which, in addition to the MTV Break the Addiction Challenge Award, is another massive accomplishment attributable to the Environment Committee’s work in recent years. And the grade we received was a C. Does any open-minded person on this campus seriously think that the Student Concerns Committee’s has a better chance than the EC of helping SMU improve its environmental score?
This Student Senate has (intentionally or not) emulated the model of corruption that the federal government has demonstrated so well in recent years. From an outsider’s view, it probably seems like the campus is already aligning itself with and adopting the Bush administration attitude in preparation for the Bush Library and think tank to come to SMU.
The most telling argument of the last Student Senate is that despite over 15 years of Environment Committee precedent, each Student Senate has the power to change the senate structure, and so they have utilized that power. Well, this is the lesson that new senators should take from their predecessors: The actions of the Student Senate before you does not matter and can be ignored.
So, senators, please ignore the illogical justifications for this farce and revisit this issue with a clear and rational mind first thing next year.
About the writer:
Joseph Grinnell is an SMU alum. He can be reached at [email protected].
