Last Monday, some Boston University students approached the Student Union with a proposal to form a second body within Union made up of a representative from each registered student organization on campus. The point of the Parliament, as they proposed to call it, would be to centralize student activities and events on campus to aid and promote organizations listed with the Student Activities Office. Currently, there are about 480 organizations registered with the SAO, which would mean about a 480-person Parliament meeting with Union to organize and plan events.
This picture alone invites some sense of paradox into the situation. Union is notoriously inefficient without the addendum of another 480 bodies. With the extra people attempting to organize themselves and propose ideas at a meeting, Union would crumble under the weight of its own ineffectuality.
The idea in and of itself is an admirable one. Student groups on campus seem markedly de-centralized and heavily lopsided in favor of the larger, more popular groups as far as event and notoriety go, and in theory, an organization in which each group has an equal say would alleviate this problem. However, as idealistic as the proposal is, it is simply impossible to accomplish on a practical level.
Moreover, the organizations listed under the SAO do not in any way depict an accurate representation of student group activity at BU. Many active organizations on campus are not registered (for example, The Daily Free Press) and many of those that are do not meet often or organize themselves in an efficient or productive manner.
Additionally, due to the vast breadth of topics around which these groups center themselves, each organization would have radically different goals in mind and therefore would not work well together as a cohesive unit. While a fraternity might want to organize an event for publicity, the BU Quad, for example, would not aim toward the same end and would not benefit from a collaboration of that sort.
It seems that wide-eyed, idealistic ideas proposed to Union that never come to fruition are the reason that the student body can sometimes become frustrated with the organization itself. Union, however, should be commended for what it does for students at this school. The BU administration is infamously difficult to deal with, and we cannot forget that it was Union that got us the 24-hour library period before finals. Sometimes, students just spread themselves too thin, and their dreams overstepped are by logistics.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
