Editorial: Dude, where’s my Senate?

The Senate is the largest body within student government, ostensibly representative of the entire student population. Senators should regularly conduct campaigns on behalf of their constituencies, effectively communicate with students and network to achieve campaign goals.

However, the 2009′-10 Senate has, thus far, lacked cohesion and experienced far too much turnover to see its projects through. The ASPSU Web site only contains a seldom-updated list of senators, which includes pictures and biographical information, but no e-mail addresses or phone numbers, making them virtually unknown and unreachable.

Senate leadership arbitrarily assigned constituencies at the beginning of the year, unrelated to the individual representative’s majors, interests or academic clusters.

Every year, up to 22 students may be elected to the Senate, and the ASPSU president later appoints three. Those senators campaign on platforms for change related to their individual communities within the university.

It’s impractical to think that at a school with over 27,000 students, many of whom are non-traditional, only 25 individuals can represent the interest of every community. To assign a liberal arts student the tasks of finding and then regularly checking in with engineering and computer science majors is counterproductive. The collective experiences and backgrounds of senators should not be ignored but instead be tapped to build coalitions and connect students to resources.

Under this constituency-based model of leadership, very little communication takes place between students and their representatives. This lack of accessibility also serves to perpetuate frustration and apathy felt by students who may want to enact change at PSU.

Last year was the first in which senators were paid for their work and the only when a campaign-based model of conducting Senate business was followed. During that year, the Senate identified the key issues of concern to most students on campus and then formed committees to tackle those issues.

The Senate is keenly aware of its current dysfunction. For several weeks, a block of time has been set aside at the bottom of the agenda to discuss the function and operation of the Senate and the ways in which its members want things to change.

To their detriment, time for discussion continues to come up short because Senate meetings regularly start 20 to 30 minutes late due to a lack of quorum. Five people resigned from the Senate over winter break, leaving only 17 members, and 13 are needed to legally hold a meeting. Every week stand-in members, known as proxies, are called in so that the body can make quorum. However, those proxies can’t vote and have very little bearing on official discussions.

As students, we pay for the senators’ monthly stipends and at the very least deserve to have the members of that body stay committed, show up to work on time and provide us with contact information. Only then can they go about the business of effectively representing the needs of students and enacting change on their behalf.
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