Dear Williams and Smith

Dear Joseph Williams and Wyatt Smith:

Congratulations on your election as Vanderbilt Student Government’s second president and vice president. For two weeks, one couldn’t flip to the Hustler’s crossword without being inundated with the campaign platforms of you and your two opponents. Thankfully, the election is over.  With only a third of the campus even bothering to cast a vote that takes thirty seconds, you won. Now it’s time for you to get to work on all those promises you made. Having a mandate from less than a third of campus, let us take a look at your campaign promises in order to focus on what you should actually accomplish in your term.

First, you promised to make improvements to the residential experience. In your ideal vision, you saw ice machines in every dorm, a movie theater in Vandy/Barnard, more off campus housing, and more student freedom in selecting hall mates. Yet, in the past year, the only thing VSG has accomplished in regards to the residential experience are a series of ice cream socials and holiday parties, along with actually restricting student choice in regards to hall mate selection. Rather than sticking up for students, you voted to allow what the administration recommended in regards to ballot grouping. Considering the actual results of VSG in the past year, it will be no surprise if at the end of your term nothing has been accomplished in regards to the residential experience save making it less student friendly.

Second, you promised to make improvements to campus dining by adding more off campus venues to the Taste of Nashville program, installing faster card readers, and making the meal plan more flexible.  Good job, this one might actually get accomplished. Oh wait, it already has.  Vanderbilt Dining made next year’s meal plan periods more flexible and they’ve added more off campus restaurants on the card. Thank you, VSG…I mean dining. All you need to do now is install faster card readers. I’m no Larry Page or Sergey Brin but I don’t think the card readers can be any faster. The information still has to travel to the dining database which doesn’t exactly have the capacity of an AMEX server. The small wait is the cost you have to pay for using monopoly money.

On a related note, you campaigned on a promise to fix technology. Your goals included replacing oasis, switching email to Microsoft Outlook, and instituting a free print quota for students. In regards to the print quota, VSG already voted to institute this, I mean “strongly urged” the administration to consider it. That was back in October.  Meanwhile, printing still costs money. Thank you VSG.  Also, the current email system may not be ideal but which student asked to switch to a Microsoft based system? The last thing we need to be do is look to Microsoft for something more user friendly.

In regards to student services, you campaigned to improve the Vandy Vans by posting schedules and running opposite routes, to open up floor access to all residents of a building from 9AM to 9PM, and to increase the number of parking spots. Considering VSG helped implement the Vandy Vans, you should have moderate success fine tuning them. As far as parking, however, is there some magic parking lot the rest of the campus doesn’t know about? You may have been too busy padding your resume with VSG experience to notice, but Vanderbilt is in the midtown district of a city. New parking can’t just be built; spaces have to come from somewhere. In the meantime, parking is a priority for teachers and staff, you know, the people who make Vanderbilt function but don’t actually live on campus. Want more parking for students? Stop making resolutions and pick up a shovel.

Having campaigned and won on this platform, you must look at what VSG has actually accomplished in the past year. Resolutions have been passed to reschedule the sprinklers on Peabody, eliminate the room reservation fee for student organizations, make the budget public, reorganize the Acfee committee, and restrict student hallmate choice in the housing lottery. The difference between what you have promised and what VSG actually accomplished is stark. With this in mind, I recommend that instead of trying to implement a platform the administration didn’t give you enough power to accomplish, you work to disband VSG.

No single proposal will do more than that for all of Vanderbilt’s students. Students and their parents will no longer have to pay fees to VSG’s budget, groundskeepers will no longer have to clean up campaign banners and posters, email inboxes will remain free of VSG clutter, and the Hustler will be able to report about meaningful issues such as diversity at lunch. Sure, some drunk kids might get soaked by the sprinklers, students will have to pay four cents a page to print, and the quantity of area programs might decrease. These things have happened even with the existence of VSG. Only those students currently involved in VSG having anything substantial to lose if it were disbanded, mainly experience in drafting and passing “strong recommendations” to higher-ups who actually run an organization and padding a resume with fancy job titles. I wish you luck in your term of office as VSG’s president and vice president. While I hope that you are able to accomplish some of your platform objectives, experience shows me that next year, nothing will have changed. With this in mind, and in the spirit of your organization, I strongly recommend that you disband VSG.

Comments

[Kevin McNish]

Aww, Ted, where were you this time last year? I could have totally used some backup! Joe and I could have made you Attorney General or something!