Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Know thy audience
How wrong can one editorial get? Pretty damn wrong. This one's not as wrong as one editorial can get, but it's still wrong.
UC Berkeley students tend to take one of three attitudes toward ASUC. There are those who tolerate the institution and its over-bearing bureaucracies in order to serve their own group’s interests by securing money from it. They represent a pragmatic middle ground flanked by those who resent the association’s very existence and others whose lives are zealously dedicated to the student government.
Interestingly, they forgot the gigantic fourth group, which is likely larger than the other three groups combined: people to whom the ASUC is entirely irrelevant. On the topic of Occidental College's student government getting smacked down to irrelevance:
While it’s easy for some to make jokes about the administration’s action or even wish for such actions here, one must not forget the dramatic consequences. The college has taken away from students’ control more than $400,000, the campus radio station and the publications board that oversees its weekly newspaper. This was possible since students were too busy bickering among themselves to stop the administration from over-stepping its authority.
I suppose we're supposed to take a lesson from this, but keep in mind that if the UC Berkeley administrators decided to axe the student government, they wouldn't be over-stepping their authority at all. That authority is pretty explicitly given. What happened to that $400,000 at Occidental? I hope they put it to something useful. We could only wish for such luck here.
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