They have already had to deal with the Arbstock fiasco and are still in dialogue with Carleton about it. They created a new Talk Back Tuesday committee to further emphasize communication between the student body and SGA. They had to put together an ad hoc committee to deal with the Larson Hall senator election. The committee did the job that they were supposed to do and called for a reelection.

Dealing with Arbstock in trouble, increased communication with students and repairing a broken election; this all happened before Senate officially convened for the year. It is obvious that SGA President Christie Larson and Heringer have been working.

But we expect a lot more, and should. SGA is the representative organization of the student body.

The Senate bylaws are up for review this year. Our senators have a clean slate – they’re writing their and our future. We need a few things from them in this process:

1. They must increase communication between the student body and Senate. Senate seems to recognize this as well – the additions of the Talk Back Tuesday Committee and student body meetings are good ones. Communication is, of course, a two-way street, and we must reciprocate the effort. Senate cannot, however, lose communication focus as the year goes on. We’ve seen that before.

2. Committees must actually make decisions and actually report back to Senate with those decisions. The role of committees in the past has been a little fuzzy, and many haven’t gotten much done. The Review and Planning Committee, for example, needs to advocate for student involvement in the development of new buildings and structures – we’d like to know what’s going on with the Science Center, for one.

3. Senate controls much of the money. Our money. We need to know more about why tuition is increasing and why programs are decreasing. What can be done about this? It is Senate’s job to let us know about such issues and give us a say.

Senate is changing – we can feel it in the wind. We expect Larson, Heringer and the rest of Senate will act correctly and creatively for the remainder of the year. High expectations lead to high performance, so that’s what we have for them. But if we find that Senate is not living up to our expectations, we’ll let them now. And so should you. Just as it is their purpose to represent us, it is our job to inform them of our needs.

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