Irrelevant agendas sap interest in ASUNM
As students, Lobo staff members have many common concerns: Tuition, textbook prices, jobs, rent, financial aid, scholarships, time, grades and the availability of classes. Notice that the lack of teddy bears for sick children did not make our list of major student concerns.
But it is one of the four central goals of the Unite slate, a group of people running for executive and legislative positions in the undergraduate student government. To be fair, the group also advocates increasing advertising for student organizations, establishing a student section at The Pit and working for a closed week before finals.
The other slate, Howl, is promising to improve student parking, make CIRT pods open 24 hours, extend the hours of Johnson Center and install a campuswide wireless network.
We don't know how important these candidates' issues or the concerns our staff described are to the average UNM student - because the student body is rarely asked. When students try to express concerns, they are ignored and silenced. At last year's regents meeting on tuition increases, students attended but were not allowed to speak until the end of a three-hour meeting.
This year, they didn't even bother. No students came forward during the public comment portion of the regents meeting on Monday.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Many of the items on the ASUNM candidates' agendas are proposals students have been hearing for years. A closed week, increasing student involvement, the CIRT pods, the Johnson hours or similar promises were made during previous campaigns - some just last year.
It's no wonder the number of students turning up to cast a ballot on Election Day has been dropping steadily for years. The Associated Students of UNM keep using the same campaign points in election after election.
The problem isn't awareness - it's relevance.
While the goals presented by this year's candidates sound nice, as they do every year, how many of them are truly important? How many of the 18,000 undergraduates are really concerned about getting a student section at The Pit? How many of us think extended hours for Johnson Gym is a top priority? While parking is a common complaint, ASUNM can hardly build its own parking structure.
On the other hand, how many students want tuition to increase by double digits each year? In fall 2003, the latest year statistics are available, 61.5 percent of main campus students received financial aid. New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the nation, so it seems reasonable to assume paying for college is a big worry for many UNM students.
Yet ASUNM and GPSA supported a higher tuition increase than UNM's staff and faculty at this year's Budget Summit. At Monday's regents meeting, ASUNM President Kevin Stevenson advocated a higher tuition increase than the regents were recommending.
That's our student fee money at work.
We know it's a challenge to get a largely commuter student population involved. The average age of a UNM undergrad is 24 - a far cry from the traditional, 18-year-old freshman who lives on campus. UNM students are older and have jobs and outside responsibilities. Many support families.
Elected officials have a responsibility to address issues that are of real concern to the majority of students. A genuine effort to reach out to a broad spectrum of UNM's population, including asking -not telling - students about their concerns and actual progress on campaign promises, would lend student government at UNM the relevance it deserves.
