State of the Yoonjin

By Yoonjin Min     2/26/14 9:47am

I did not get involved with the Student Association to play the role of a politician. I have no interest in becoming a politician outside of Rice. To be perfectly frank, I have very little interest in politics altogether.

I did not get involved with the Student Association to play the role of a politician. I have no interest in becoming a politician outside of Rice. To be perfectly frank, I have very little interest in politics altogether. I ran for president to work on projects that affected students, and to ensure that we had a spot at the table for any conversation that involved us. I ran for president to collect and advocate the student opinion, even when the message was one that administrators did not want to hear.

However, despite all that we have been able to accomplish as an officer team this year, we have received the most attention and feedback toward issues in our elections process. Students seem so ready to discount an entire organization or shame a group of students who have been working tirelessly in an effort to improve the student experience at Rice. Borrowing the words of Duncan College President Jeremy Scher, it is convenient to create a scapegoat of the government. But this all seems like campus politics to me, and detracts from the real issue at hand.

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This semester, we launched a survey about how one receives transfer credit from study abroad, when students can drop classes and the potential for penalties, registration issues, transcript content, and more. We got good responses to the survey, but along with it, a slew of emails from students complaining that they were receiving too many reminders to take the survey. In fact, the discussions I overheard at mealtimes were never about the content of the survey itself, but rather the emails being sent about it. The survey’s outcome will influence changes that affect every student — from the way you decide to shop for classes, to the classes you end up taking, to the transcript you receive when you graduate. We work hard to ensure student input influences the Faculty Senate’s decisions, but so many students don’t even care to provide that input.

Ravi Sheth’s write-in campaign has drawn a ton of attention because of its rhetoric. The word “broken” has been attached to the SA. But I don’t think he’s necessarily referring solely to the officer team. By definition, the Student Association is made up of all undergraduate students. As he puts in his letter, “there was an unpalatable complacency; nobody cared about blatantly egregious issues that seemed to be popping up each and every week.” It’s student apathy that we need to fight.

We’ve changed a lot as an organization in recent years. When I was a freshman NSR, I proxied for my college president almost every week. This year, we’ve had some members miss four meetings a term, who were then automatically removed. But none of them disregarded the SA or blatantly missed meetings. They always had legitimate time conflicts and would tell me and the secretary accordingly. They also never failed to provide insight and worked with their colleges to develop opinions on the topics at hand. Presidents have served on task forces and working groups in realms way outside of their own college.

The SA will continue to evolve over the next few years. I can only hope that this change in the college leadership’s attitude will be adopted by the rest of the student body — and that moving forward the attention awarded the SA elections process will catalyze continued interest in all important issues affecting Rice students. Student self-governance is only what students make of it.

- Student Associate president Yoonjin Min

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