Students give SA Un-Improved Award

April 21, 2008 —

After all of the SA and Student Life Awards are handed out, we believe there may have been one organization not recognized for their work this year. We would like to give SA the award for most Un-Improved Student Organization of the Year! This award does not come after just a semester of shortcomings and downfalls, but a whole year of blunders in the areas of programming, constituent services, diversity education and training, and most importantly, student representation.

It does not just take one president or one committee chair to achieve this level of incompetency, but a whole association to attain this type of recognition. Whether it was losing around $11,000 on a program (the Valentine's Day dance) that less than 300 SVSU students attended or handing out money for awards to student organizations when they could not even allocate money for student organization programming or sponsor any more Study Abroad scholarships, SA has kept its reputation for mediocrity alive. We bet some students reading this article probably do not even know what SA is or what it has done. How could anyone know what SA has done, when really, it has not done much at all.

The truth is that no matter how many "Green is Sexy" t-shirts it sells, Health and Wellness fairs it holds, or Hooter's wings it feeds to a small amount of students, there were still no events besides Relay for Life that stick out in any average student's mind. Let not its war on diversity go unrecognized either.

In the course of a year, SA has gotten rid of its diversity officer and it was not until students showed some type of disdain for this action that they actually created a committee, but then did not give it the funding it needed to do real work for students here at SVSU.

On behalf of many students here at SVSU, we would like to thank and congratulate SA for many different reasons.

First, thank you for showing the student body and many other registered student organizations that no matter how much trouble, lack of funds or support they have, they will still do anything better than our own student government who is given over $100, 000 of our money. Secondly, congratulations on becoming so out of touch with the campus community and the student body that you have felt no need to accomplish anything this year, besides support a smoking policy discriminatory not only to our own American students, but international students and students with disabilities as well. Finally, thank you, SA, for proving that the misconception about government being bad really is not that far off the mark.

Best of luck next year with all of your endeavors! We are hoping for the best.

Nick Tereck
sociology senior

Isaac Hudson
history sophomore

Mary Dieterle
communication senior

Doug Collings
communication senior

Derek Rudel
graphic design junior

Jamey Latocki
education junior

Katie Klco
nursing freshman

Josh Parker
education junior

Alex Straley
nursing freshmen