Vanguard Vision: Creating Problems To Solve Becoming Common Practice

A scary trend – SVSU isn’t perfect, and it’s unfair to expect it to be. But it becomes increasingly difficult to satisfy a population who remains relatively quiet about their needs and problems. What this has created is a culture where certain groups create problems to solve, and the solutions do little to serve anyone but the people who created them. The burden rests on us all to walk our problems down to the people who can help and it’s their job to walk to us to seek our concern.

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Our university has seen a lot of changes in the past decade. New buildings, a more entrenched presence in the community and a perpetually growing student population. The latter, at least in regards to student activity, complaints and need assessment, presents an important task for student leaders and their respective organizations on campus. The more people here, the more difficult it is to gauge what their needs are and how to address them without disenfranchising a disproportionate number of the campus population.

Such is the task of any government or body of a few charged with the responsibility of helping a potentially voiceless many.

That voiceless many is never easy to reach. They tend to hide in their dorms and let their complaints dissolve into vapor after all-too-brief conversations with their fellow socially apathetics.

There’s no easy way to get through this kind of person. Surveys go unfilled, questionnaires go unanswered, meetings go unattended.

The result of this culture of passionate disinterest seems to be those few participants in the system meant to help their unmotivated population create problems to solve that cost us all in the end.

This is an dangerous double-edged sword. And it’s one we at SVSU have been playing with for a long time.

In the last few years, rules have been instituted, initiatives undertaken by student leaders that seem to solve a pressing issue, but because there are so many here who remain silent, the question of who made these issues pressing becomes an extremely relevant one.

A terrific example of this is the eternally debated smoking policy enacted last winter. It’s a policy that at one point was deemed unenforceable by the administration, only to be enacted because the few saw it as a potential personal and political victory that points to their ability to get things done if they want to.

But was this really an issue that demanded action? I think the answer can be found in the students and staff who, nearly a year later, still smoke in front of buildings and are not reprimanded for it.

Who’s to blame for this? All of us. The unconscious many for doing little-to-nothing to bring their issues to the students who can help them, and the acting few for not taking enough initiative to pound the pavement and force out of those who flood the Courtyard every day in between walking to class.

“Tried” should not be a word in a government’s vocabulary. Neither should the phrase “personal victory.” Reaching people trying not to be reached is a savage undertaking with no end. But it’s the awful task of any governing body. And it begins with action.