Grade of the union

When all is said and done, we gave the Board of Directors grades based on how well they performed two-thirds through their term. The results varied, but we feel they received a score that adequately reflects the quality and consistency of the work they did. Keeping this in mind, it is important to remember that the B.o.D. are only four arms on a much larger organization, the McMaster Student’s Union. How would it look if we graded the MSU as a whole on its performance this year?

Initiatives

The MSU has made great strides in highlighting persistent student issues and creating programs to try and combat those issues. One such program is Mental Health Awareness week. Many students struggle with issues of depression and stress in the later months of the first term, and initiatives such as this one show that the MSU is putting student needs first. There is still a great ways to go when it comes to helping students with mental health problems, but the MSU can only do so much on their own, and it is a step in a very necessary direction.

The Student Life Enhancement Fund is another example of a student-empowering initiative that has hit some milestones this year. It is a program that lets students decide what to do with student money, and this year they’ve seen an incredible amount of SLEF idea submissions, which shows that students have taken notice and want to be engaged.

The Red Tape

One of the issues that plagues the lifetime of any initiative or idea is the amount of bureaucracy that surrounds getting anything done in the MSU. The sheer amount of boards and assemblies and ratifying councils that an idea has to go through make it very difficult for students to see any tangible results in a reasonable time frame.

An idea is brought up by a student. An SRA member takes that student’s idea to assembly. The motion is approved and the Directors take that idea to Executive Board. The Executive Board makes a recommendation on how to proceed and from there it can go on to any number of faculty councils, senate committees, or even just get lost in student politics limbo in which ideas stagnate forever.

It would be worth their time to try and prune down the amount of obstacles that are present to spending student money on student projects, but it it isn’t an easy notion. Easily one of the MSU’s worst aspects.

Communication

A running theme in all of the Director reviews was that they had issues communicating with their constituents. This is not an issue exclusive to the Board, unfortunately. The MSU as a whole has often had difficulty communicating with students and getting their message across.

The MSU could only benefit from devoting more resources towards making communication a priority. That kind of movement would certainly resonate with the B.o.D. and only help to serve students at the end of the day. There’s no point in students putting together these great projects if nobody knows about them, and this takes advantage of them.

The MSU deserves a decent grade for the great work its been doing. but it shouldn’t be taken as a “good enough,” but more as a “we expect better from you.” But it is not just the Board’s MSU. It is — your — MSU, and you should want it to have the kind of grade your parents would put on the fridge.