CSU’s midterm grade is anything but an A

Well the midterm season has hit most of us full-force now, and it’s time to start grading performances. So, what grade should the CSU executives get?
Undoubtedly they’ve been quite busy in the four and a half months that the Access slate has been in power, but how many of their projects deserve a good grade is debatable.
To start off there’s VP-Internal Laith Marouf and former VP and current CSU councillor Tom Keefer getting expelled during the summer for allegedly shouting death threats at Concordia security personnel. This alleged situation arose after the two were caught spray-painting on Concordia property. Not exactly showing pride in the place where you work, nor showing respect to your employers, the students. Also, whether or not these two workers of the student union were actually students themselves is questionable. However, just recently the two won a minor victory with a court order allowing them back into CSU offices until their lawsuit against the administration is concluded.
Then there’s the CSU Agenda. Enough said? Almost, but let’s go through it anyway. The CSU Agenda is a service to the entire student population, which cost $50,000 for around 14,000 copies. However, the copies were very late in coming, partly due to complications with the printers.
The agenda was not very practical. With no personal contacts section, clear-cut separations between the months, or easy-access to daily pages it makes it the worst agenda in the CSU’s history. In addition, even the sketchy health suggestions were deemed misleading by Concordia’s own health services.
Then there’s the content of the agenda. That could be debated ’till the cows come home,’ but what can be agreed on is there are a variety of responses to the content; some good, most bad. What is shocking is that this CSU service, paid for by the students is so infuriating to a big part of them, alienating some, and while concentrating only on minority groups rather than the population as a whole.
The CSU tried to rectify the agenda confusion with a meeting a few weeks ago, but it failed due to the limited time that was set aside to discuss the content, and plans for next years agenda.
A hardly known fact about the agenda was the misinformation given on
availability of agendas. There has been a sign above the CSU offices door for three weeks saying there are no more agendas available. However, editors at thispaper found a stash of more than 400 agendas in the distribution centre of the Hall Building, waiting there for weeks, sitting in an area usually reserved for things going to recycling. The CSU says these agendas are intended for the Dean of Students Office at Loyola, but that office says they haven’t received any shipment of new agendas for a month, and the agendas are nowhere to be found.
Then there is the General Assembly of September 26, where none of the motions proposed by the CSU were passed. The only original motion that was voted on, was flatly turned down by the majority of the attendees. The loss was not so controversial since it was merely the people exercising their democratic rights,
but what was more interesting was the CSU reaction afterwards. The CSU accused the school’s administration of trying to affect the vote by persuading certain students to vote. Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter, nor does it differ much from tactics used last year where CSU staff spent three weeks going class to class trying to get students to vote on accreditation. What is more important is that the CSU’s employers spoke in a resounding voice, and the CSU shouldn’t
be second-guessing that message.
In a similar case, the CSU council recently decided to circumvent their own bylaws concerning a recall petition with more than 3,000 student signatures on it. According to the bylaws, the CSU must hold the new elections within 30 days of delivery of the petition, but the council found this unreasonable since there was no chief electoral officer at the time, and extended the time limit by 15 days.
Which brings us to a painfully obvious issue that the CSU has not been taking care of their basic jobs, as in having a CEO or a functioning judicial board yet. It is expected that both these things will be named by the time of this printing, but what must be asked is how come it’s taken four months to get these positions filled? How can a democratic organization call itself functional when the branch that deals with complaints and justice doesn’t even exist?
And to put the cherry on top of what’s been a tumultuous month, former CSU president Sabrina Stea resigned last week, complaining of outside forces. In the CSU’s defense, Stea listed some of their lesser-known accomplishments: a co-op bookstore, a service contract with the People’s Potato and hopefully a service contract with the VAV gallery. Not bad, the co-op bookstore could eventually prove very useful for the student population at large, but for the moment it’s gone mostly un-noticed.
So what’s the final grade for the CSU executives for their first months of
serving the students? Well let’s just say the CSU is not realizing their full
potential and there is definitely room for improvement.

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