Brown: SGB deserves credit, admittedly

I’ve tried to dislike Charlie Shull’s SGB administration. I really have.

As someone who has… I’ve tried to dislike Charlie Shull’s SGB administration. I really have.

As someone who has attended SGB meetings from every session since Joe Pasqualichio ran the show in 2006, I’ve seen SGBs so bad they would make the U.S. Congress blush. Just when I’d think they couldn’t reach any higher in the sphere of incompetence, it felt as if these boards would go out of their way to surprise me.

But Charlie and the gang have done all right so far.

As far as bone-headed moves from the current board go, I can’t think of any offhand, which is surprising. I wish I could report back that Shull mishandled my voter registration card during the activities fair, but I don’t think his looking at my political affiliation was particularly un-kosher.

Since taking office last January, the administration has addressed the bulk of my SGB nitpicking. It made meetings more accessible to the little guy by moving them from the eighth floor of the Union to the basement — a much more visible location.

SGB has also brought structure to the allocations process by mandating that organizations requesting funds be present for discussion. Additionally, student organizations receiving allocated funds for advertising must now print “paid for by the Student Activity Fee and allocated by the Student Government Board” on their posters after the passage of the Public Advertising Resolution last April.

Like the meeting relocation decision, this policy makes good sense, as I’m sure there are plenty of students out there who wonder where their annual $180 activity fee goes.

By this time any other year, the only good I’d be able to discern in SGB’s activities would probably come in the form of one of former board member Nila Devanath’s pet projects. In a November 2009 column of mine, I said of the current Graduate and Professional Student Assembly president, “If more SGB members shared her ardor, perhaps SGB’s integrity wouldn’t even be in question.”

I’m glad they decided to take note.

Since “Boy Mayor” Luke Ravenstahl’s attempt last year to tax students at nonprofit institutions, like Pitt, to compensate for his own administration’s mismanagement of funds, Shull has begun rallying the students in a heightened voter registration campaign. At the public meeting held to speak out against the Fair Share Tax last November, Shull said he’d mobilize 17,000 Pitt students to vote out City Council if they passed the tax.

No offense to him, but his William Wallace moment at the Council meeting became something of a punchline during conversations I held with other civic-minded students. He and SGB might just follow through with it though. And I might have to eat my words — graciously.

The student government’s purpose is to engage campus life. Simply put, if Board members don’t make us want to care about Pitt and Pittsburgh’s goings-on, they’ve failed. Instead, they’re taking on the challenge.

But they could do so much more now. I’ve had a working wish list since freshman year, and since this group has gotten through a good chunk of it already, I might as well reveal the rest for them to work on. So here it goes:

1) Make the allocations process even more transparent. Yes, that means making meetings open to the public even if they don’t include time for audience participation.

2) Get Chancellor Nordenberg to attend meetings, if only to show support.

3) Guarantee that subcommittees never have nonresponses during meetings. Whether Freshman Affairs or the proposed Student Civic Engagement Committee, these groups should always have projects to work on.

4) Ramp up student involvement. Tell Student Life to relax its rules with tabling and meet-and-greets with SGB. Like I said, make students care.

5) Lastly, dissolve the current SGB structure. Having nine largely homogeneous board members does not make for the best representation of life around campus. I’m not usually a fan of bureaucracy, but 17,000 students deserve representation, and they hail from a wide variety of residence halls, areas of campus and schools within the University.

Speaking with Devanath last year, I was told that conversations had taken place concerning reformatting SGB into a senate to cover a greater level of diversity among students. Carnegie Mellon uses this system, and Duquesne has an executive board modeled much like our current Board, along with senators from each college.

I know most of these requests are long shots, but, then again, I used to think having SGB do its job properly was asking too much.

The current SGB members have four months not only to make further strides in campus politics, but also to revolutionize the way students think of their representatives. It is my hope they step up to that challenge.

Editor’s Note: This story has been changed to correct an error, made by an editor, that misstated the number of SGB meetings Brown has attended.