Council Should Be Repaired, Not Abolished

To the editors:

I believe in student government. I believe students deserve a voice on this campus. I believe we have a stake in shaping our education. And I believe that the Undergraduate Council, despite all its ills, despite calls for its dismemberment on this very page (Opinion, Oct. 12), remains the forum for this discussion.

For the last two years, I, like most of the campus, have been a council basher. I delighted in crashes of 'ucvote' and the "found" $40,000 as examples of council incompetence.

However, this year, I decided that I could not truly assess the council and feel right about harshly judging its activities until I first became involved. It simply isn't right to give up on an institution because of limited information and a pervasive campus prejudice. In order to be fair in criticizing, I decided I must first try to change what I perceived to be wrong.

And so I ran for the council. What I have found this year, surprisingly, is an organization with tremendous potential. The council does more than I ever imagined. Take student group funding, for example--the council just passed a budget allocating a record $120,000 for student group grants, stepping in where the administration has failed the students. Because of council involvement, the phone rates were just lowered.

The council is responsible for pushing the week-long intersession proposal through the administration. And who's making the noise for a campus student center to provide office space for student groups? Yup, the council again.

The problem, in the most basic sense, is that students don't care. Voter turnouts are disgraceful, and students rarely use the council to spur campus-wide debate.