STUDENT GOVERNMENT: President’s absence eases proceedings

By: Alex Sorondo / Columnist

Denise Haplin, president of the Student Government Council at the Biscayne Bay Campus, attended the Nov. 4 University-wide meeting via telephone. Calling from what sounded like the center of a Cambodian street market, she was forced to keep her phone on mute throughout most of the meeting, thus making her greatest contribution to the proceedings by not saying anything.

Alex Sorondo / Columnist

In the pursuit of brevity, the details will have to go unmentioned in referring back to the cover-your-ears-and-shut-your-eyes embarrassment of watching the SGC-BBC conduct itself at the Oct. 21 University-wide meeting, sporting a deficiency of professionalism like a vacuum has of oxygen.

That meeting – in which every issue was tabled and not a single decision was made – was presided by Ms. Haplin, whose acerbic manner fed the indignation and naïveté from which her colleagues scraped their every barbed and wandering argument.

Here, for the Nov. 4 meeting at the Modesto Maidique Campus, under the orchestration of Patrick O’Keefe, president of the Student Government Council at MMC, the SGC-BBC was still of greater hindrance than help.

Their contributions to the discussions – with the exception of a few remarks made by SGC-BBC vice president Emilio Collyer – were largely digressive, meandering, inarticulate and prone to constipating whatever progress was on the brink of being made.

And yet, bad as they were, they were far more agreeable without Ms. Halpin than they have otherwise been, an improvement attributable to the assertiveness with which O’Keefe directed the meeting, aided by SGC-MMC Vice President Sanjeev Udhnani’s repeated contribution of figures, alternatives and resolutions.

When SGC-BBC didn’t  look totally uninterested or spaced, they looked confused. They dribbled these painfully awkward sentences, slow-spoken as they clawed for one mature-sounding word at a time in the hopeless quest for erudition.

And it just invariably yields to these clumsy and uncertain statements that begin “I believe that…” and which then go on and on.

In spite of their presence and the necessity of acknowledging it, some progress was made, namely the decision – tabled by senselessly vehement argument at the previous meeting – to make the MMC-BBC shuttle free to students on Monday and Tuesday of fall finals week.

The free rides, which usually charge $2.50 each way, will cost the Student Government Association an estimated $2,500 for the chosen days.

SGC-BBC argued that, rather than spending $2,500 to give students free rides on finals week, they should spend $7,000 to offer those same free rides during the spring semester’s Week of Welcome, an idea that seemed more like a way to get rid of their money somehow because it’s illegal to burn it.

They were brought to their senses by SGC-MMC comptroller Cristina Loreto, who pointed out that the goal of a student

government is to aid its students with useful services.

Offering free rides to students during finals week, she argued, would be far more helpful than doing so during Week of Welcome, when missing the bus doesn’t mean failing a class.