By Chris Dobeck, President of WCSA
The other day a close friend asked what the Wesleyan Council on Student Affairs (WCSA) was doing to make a presence on campus.
In all honesty, I floundered. Make a name for ourselves? We’re the people everyone comes to for funding. The Campus Programming Board (CPB) is the outreach part of our student government.
This friend not only asked an important question, they answered why WCSA has fallen into such a rut.
OWU students don’t care about stu- dent government, because student governments haven’t shown the care deserving of OWU students. Over the years WCSA strayed from initiatives, gave up on the legacy of itself and its students and confounded itself with unnecessary professionalism.
As president, I never sought to push a legislative agenda. Surely all the senators had pet projects. Policy reform, food, sustainability, and budgetary guidelines have gone through the ringer. Now, our well-spring of creativity has begun to trickle.
Over the last month, the Senate has hit gridlock again and again talking about reforms to the treasurer position. It has brought the momentum of progress to a halt. Today, that changes.
This April my administration will push for a New Student Affairs Policy, bringing the cloistered WCSA out of its shell. We’ll push for initiatives students care about, like a water fountain in Sanborn. We’ll begin to build monuments to OWU students of ages past; civil rights activists like Mary King, abolitionists like Fredrick Merrick, and Vice President of the United States Charles Fairbanks. Through our new policy, WCSA will end this brutal isolation, reaching out to students in constructive ways, like offering of office hours to voice complaints and turning the WCSA of office into a quiet study room in the weeks leading up to finals.
Politicians always promise things. It’s kind of the bread and butter of our career. But honestly, you guys deserve better. These policies should be ful lled because we, as a student government, have the op- portunity to help make this school really something. At this point many WCSA members have been here long enough to know what we can and can’t do. The difference between what we can do and what we have done de nes who really was t for the job. So when 2017 comes to a close, I hope WCSA remembered to do all they can.