I am writing this in response to last week’s Editorial Notebook, “Senate needs improvement,” by Cara Riverso.
As the end of an article—or editorial piece—often restates or summarizes the major point(s) of that piece, I would like to comment on Riverso’s final statement, which was, “A Student Senate with such low productivity will only hurt the students in the long run.” It is particularly interesting Riverso would say this, considering she has “sat in on meetings for two different Senates,” because if she actually was sitting in on this Senate’s meetings, she would have a better idea of what’s going on. Since she rarely shows up to meetings (and I would know, I’m at every single one of them), I find it appalling that The Poly allowed the publication of this article by Riverso wherein she claims to be any kind of authority on this matter.
Making a major assumption that Riverso actually cares enough about the Student Senate to follow it closely—as opposed to just picking an easy topic to write about because it’s her turn to fill an Editorial Notebook—I’d like to delve into the meat of her article: Winterfest. Riverso spends more than half of her article bashing Winterfest, all the while making claims that she doesn’t mean to put anyone down—as if that would be a worry if she really was providing constructive criticism. Nevertheless, the lack of publicity Winterfest received in the week prior to its inception was due in part to The Poly itself, but that’s another story.
Since Riverso didn’t offer any solutions, only grievances, I’m going to take the initiative and lay some out. For one, I’ve called upon the Senate WebTeam to be more diligent about posting minutes and motions on the website, despite having never heard a complaint from any other student in the past, save this Poly columnist. The rest of our website is updated, however, and we’re rolling out a new one, which hasn’t had its official launch yet, contrary to what Riverso’s thoroughly researched article claimed.
As for the Senate having a great deal of room for improvement, I challenge Riverso to stop by my office sometime or e-mail me—I conclude my weekly Top Hat article that her news organization publishes with the address—to discuss this with me. We could always improve, but just because we don’t spend two hours every week in celebratory chitter-chatter over the things we’ve accomplished, and just because I don’t list every little thing the Senate is working on in my weekly column doesn’t mean that a hell of a lot hasn’t been accomplished. Perhaps the campus would be better served if Riverso were to direct her analytical skills towards what’s presently lacking in the The Poly’s News section. After all, the Senate can only address problems if they’re first brought to our attention.
The Student Senate … we’re just a bunch of students, like you, and most of us like this school enough to put in at least several hours each week trying to make it better. But we can only do so much. We only have 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week. We are involved in other organizations, we have piles of homework to do and exams to study for every week, and we get tired and want downtime, just like everybody else. We aren’t better than anyone else going to RPI, we’re just trying our hardest to make improvements in the quality of life here for each and every student.
If you have qualms about the Student Senate, come talk to me about them. I will take whatever amount of time is necessary to sit down and listen to you, then develop a plan to address your concerns. My e-mail is published in my “Top Hat” every week, but in case you don’t read that or you’ve forgotten it, here it is again: gm@rpi.edu. Use it. Riverso sure didn’t, and instead of helping RPI, she wasted 13 minutes of my time (one minute spent reading her article, 12 minutes writing this response). It wouldn’t have even required her to use any of the now-forgotten investigative journalism skills taught by The Poly.
Since I am only allotted 700 words, my full response to Riverso’s article is posted at:
http://rpi.edu/~leusnj/response.html
Julia Leusner
CHEM ’08
Editor’s Note: Please see the Editor’s Corner on page 6 for a response as well as clarifications and corrections that would not fit here.
