The two top Student Association leaders spent the year injecting themselves into University conversations about cost of attendance and career services, passing over many of their early messaging goals and touting few tangible achievements in their term.
Student Association President John Richardson pledged in August to “break the insulation” between students and the SA, but he shifted his efforts late in the fall when he realized the need to identify concrete goals before focusing on messaging. By November he had turned his attention to fees and career services, emerging as the student voice in campus administrators’ conversations about these top concerns.
“I can tell [students] what I’m doing, but it’s more important that I know what students want, and focus on getting that done,” Richardson said, adding that he used G-Voice and town halls as his main way of soliciting student concerns to shape his agenda. “If you improve your communications and things like that, what’s the point if you don’t have things to communicate?”
The 30-student team of communication ambassadors for his proposed outreach office and the calendar site, called Involvio, were not put to use. Though G-Voice – an online discussion forum launched in October – has collected digital votes on two-dozen ideas, including more bike racks on campus and equipping food trucks with GWorld machines, few suggestions from the site have seen further action.
Late in the fall, the executive team took on smaller-scale issues, such as redrafting alcohol policies for graduate student groups, increasing lighting for evening sporting events on the Mount Vernon Campus, renewing commitments to newspaper delivery and bringing in speakers for a monthly University-wide debate series.
Though the SA executives took steps toward each target – funding a temporary New York Times subscription, meeting with graduate groups about alcohol policies and hosting four debates, mostly with faculty, for the speaker series – there are no official changes in place for next year.
Richardson said his contributions to conversations like the Career Services Task Force and the Marvin Center fifth floor – where he served as a top lobbyist for expanding student organization space – cannot always be boiled down to a single achievement, because no University decision is made by a single person and “everything is done in committee.”
This semester, the pair ramped up efforts to increase transparency on student fees – an initiative that saw a slow start, but garnered a campus-wide buy-in from administrators.
Student Association Executive Vice President Ted Costigan and Richardson say their efforts have saved students a quarter-million dollars from the elimination of fees, including printing and counseling, but could not provide data to validate this claim.
The duo also claimed the elimination of University Counseling Center fees as an SA victory, which they said collectively saved students $150,000 per year. The much-maligned fee was eliminated in early September, part of a University-wide spotlight about mental health that arose after a student suicide last April.
Mark Levine, interim director of UCC, said the executive pair “represented the student voice very well through the entire research, decision making and implementation process of our ‘up to 6-free session’ pilot this academic year.”
In February, Costigan negotiated a two-cent drop to reach a printing cost of 7 cents per page at Gelman and Eckles libraries, which he touted as a victory that would save all students about $40,000 a year.
“We have had unprecedented achievement in lowering the cost of attendance to GW students,” Costigan said.
The SA president said his biggest achievement was firing up the University’s efforts on career services. He said he got involved when administrators were still mulling a potential overhaul, and repeated his call for change to University President Steven Knapp and the Board of Trustees.
“By prioritizing this, we got something that will positively affect all students," Richardson said. “This year has been about building the model, looking at how we want to do it, and making sure it actually happens.”
The University announced in February that it would fund about a dozen new positions to steer the new career center model rollout over the next three years – funding that Richardson said his lobbying and work in committees helped secure.
Executive Director of University Initiatives Robert Snyder said the executive team helped the Dean of Students Office outline and spread the word about changes for the career services model.
“[Dean of Students] Peter Konwerski and I remain grateful to John and Ted for working side-by-side with us and our colleagues at every step in the process, from designing and refining the enhancements, to facilitating multiple opportunities for students to learn about the enhancements and offer input, and, finally, to advocating with us for the essential funding that is now making the enhancements a reality,” Snyder said.
The University began mulling an overhaul to the Career Center in fall 2010.
Reflecting on the SA organization as a whole, Richardson said he thinks it would function better if its two priorities were advocacy and allocations – not the senate’s resolutions. He has criticized the body throughout the year for failing to take on lobbying projects and bring forward bills about issues that affect the students they are representing.
“Do we really need a senate? I think it’s integral to have representatives for all the different schools, but if they’re not going to do anything, then who cares?” Richardson said.
This year’s SA Senate, which had its final meeting last week, saw no advancement on issues that came up during last year’s campaign, including Gelman, 4-Ride and academic advising.
Chase Hardin, a freshman SA senator, said structural problems and lack of interaction within the organization prevented Richardson and Costigan from achieving more this year.
“There is a huge lack of communication within the SA committees and branches. The SA as a whole is rather dysfunctional,” Hardin, ESIA-U, said.
The Student Association Senate passed a total of five non-binding resolutions this year that called for University action on a student issue. Other than amending bylaws and passing annual allocation bills, the senate supported a Greek life merchandise fair, vending machines in Gelman, University funding for the Marvin Center and condom dispensers in residence halls.
Why so bitter? Wow. Not very well researched, statements are misleading and you wrote the article with a very obvious anti-SA agenda because that’s what sells. And you completely throw John and Ted under the bus to serve that agenda.
Grade-A journalism, folks.
I agree with Anonymous, above. This is simply SA bashing. “No data” to backup saving students money? How about the historical data that shows how much students use counseling and printing services each year?
This article is poorly researched with strongly held biases. A bad combination for anyone who aspires to be a “real” journalist.
This article is repulsive. John and Ted have improved GW for the better, and taking shots at them like this is completely unfounded. It seems to me like they’ve done an outstanding job, so why don’t you provide some constructive criticism instead of just bashing them? This is a pathetic example of the intelligence at GW.
Is this an opinion piece or a news story? I thought Sarah Ferris was supposed to be the Campus NEWS Editor. Obviously not. This is an opinion hit piece, not a news story.
A note to incoming SA executives – trash talking your own senate or anyone else for the sake of your own image doesn’t actually make you look any better.
Ugh. When a friend described this article to me earlier, I thought he was exaggerating. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The Hatchet continues to write opinion stories based on half-truths about the SA. Disheartening. Hopefully the new EIC will take a different approach than Lauren French, who took a decidedly un-journalistic one.
To be honest, I’m confused as to why this is in the “news” section. This article seems to me to be entirely opinion. I agree with the article that the SA senate seems to have been largely inactive this year, but this article focuses on the executive. I also agree that Richardson was largely ineffective as president, but Costigan seems to have been somewhat effective. The Coulter/O’Donnell debate, printing fee reduction, and counciling fees can be attributed to Costigan, and the article did a poor job of reporting on these.
Here we go with SA bashing. I think the Hatchet needs to evaluates its position in the divide between the SA and the GW community. If year after year the Hatchet condemns the SA, then why doesnt someone if your office step up and run the SA. Im tired of opinion from those who sit and type on their computers. Dont ask a freshman senator who has no active role in the Senate how he thinks the SA should run. The real question is: has he ever gone to a meeting with a GW administrator who asks us to be patient, because the university is trying to tackle its 1000 job to-do list. The Hatchet is losing its credibility within the GW community. Professors dont like when you publish false numbers in terms of income and most find your articles purely fact-less. Dont false advertise as a reputable newspaper when your job is divisive. I personally challenge of your ‘journalist’ to step up an actually advocate for students through your precious print and online forum.
To be fair, while this may have taken on a negative tone, not much is false. It’s unfortunate, but not much was accomplished this year. A lot of people became distracted by other activities or apathetic, and we have to accept that. A 2 cent printing fee reduction isn’t that big a deal, it only saves the average student $3. There could have been other things we all could have been working on, and that includes the Cabinet, Senate, and JR and Ted.
I have to give Hugo Scheckter and James Ferguson credit, though, for never straying from their goals for this university. Hugo achieved a lot for club sports athletes with free medical care and training, and James worked very hard to open Funger Hall to Vern Express riders and to get Emerg on the Vern.
So let’s not get wrapped up in who said what, even if it seemed like opinion – everyone is entitled to their own opinion after all. Let’s just work harder next year.