Sunday, April 01, 2007

What the campaign SHOULD have been about on campus

Congratulations to Tony Texeira and Abe Cohen for winning the student government election this week.

Also - congratulations to Sigma Phi Epsilon for winning Greek Week for the fraternities for the fifth straight year and congratulations to Theta Phi Alpha for winning Greek Week for the sororities.

Now that the election is over...

Tony and Abe: Members of the two biggest fraternities on campus. That means they will have support at their events (their brothers and their friends in the Greek community). However, it also means that they might not be 100 percent dedicated to their job in student government. I think Abe is a born leader and is really good at taking an event or an idea and running with it. Tony is good at sticking to his guns and facing adversity.

Jared and Rocky: Jared's fraternity won comeback organization of the year and finished third in Greek Week. Rocky dropped his fraternity letters about two or three years ago - about the same time he got heavily involved in SG. I think Jared is truly dedicated to improving this university and supporting the ideas of students. He was involved with the student spirit groups this year and help to create the Crazy Cooney's and the Rowdy Rex's. Rocky...well, he has been involved with the "regime" for the last few years. Ya know, the "regime" that bought $200,000 worth of couches for the UC, raised their own pay 25 percent and took a nice "leadership trip" to Key West for over $10,000.

Here's one thing that the candidates forgot: free stuff and spirit.

Candidates were right to say they would support Greek Housing, the fitness center, etc. If you didn't support those things, you would be committing political suicide. What they forgot to advocate was for free stuff. T-shirts, food, etc. That's what students care about. Generally, they don't care about what you did last year. Generally, they are concerned about the future of the university and new buildings going up. They want t-shirts. They want free food. They want more money for their clubs.

What someones campaign platform should have been was: You pay $10 in A & S fees per credit hour. We'll make sure you get that money back. We'll give you free food events once a week in the Breezeway. We'll give you cups that you can go to the cafeteria in the Breezeway and have refills on for only 50 cents instead of paying almost $2.00 for a large soda everyday. We'll give you a Starbucks mug to refill your coffee everyday for a reduced price. We'll give you t-shirts that you can wear around the university to receive discounts at the cafeteria and bookstore.

That's what students want. They want something NOW. Most students won't want to support new buildings that they won't even see construction begin on, let alone open before they transfer or graduate. They want things NOW.

5 Comments:

At 12:33 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Those are all great ideas.

I especially like the one about the refillable FAU cup. Why that has never been done before is beyond me.

I also believe Scantrons should be free from the Bookstore. I understand they're available at SG, but most students don't know that and most students don't want to walk all the way over to the Student Union for a scantron.

Anyway, we need more SG events that promote school spirit, that's for sure.

 
At 2:46 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

 
At 3:13 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

Smitty:

It would be great to be able to hand out a lot of "free stuff".

Unfortunately it's very difficult to be fair with “give-aways” on a campus of 17,000+ students. Most of the good stuff is grabbed in a few minutes and a lot of people feel left out.

How do you suggest for SG to balance "free stuff" with all of its other obligations?

 
At 4:45 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Unfortunately it's very difficult to be fair with “give-aways” on a campus of 17,000+ students. Most of the good stuff is grabbed in a few minutes and a lot of people feel left out."

Agreed.

We could take a phased approach, with boxes of the "good stuff" coming every hour to ensure that, for instance, one person doesn't take four free mini-staplers.

Additionally, it could be done in "goodie-bag" form to ensure that one person only gets one of each item.

Furthermore, items should be handed out only to people wearing FAU stuff -- that way we're rewarding people for having school spirit. Since not everyone will be wering FAU stuff, that's another way to stem the tide a little bit.

 
At 11:38 AM, Blogger Dimensional Difficulties said...

Right. Free stuff. More important to FAU students than academic improvement. That's why this dump will always be a fourth-tier university.

 

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