A walk down memory lane

On Monday, the Indiana Daily Student reported a "year in a review" of the IU Student Association's Vote for Pedro administration. Led by IUSA President Alex Shortle, during the course of one year there were three major accomplishments: implementing the universal transportation program, in which students pay an increased transportation fee and receive access to riding campus buses; developing the student readership program, which for $2 per student, made copies of The New York Times and USA Today available to the student body; and removing the controversial $30 athletics fee, with only some minor damage to the luxuries students have at IU sports events.\nThe sore spots were abundantly clear as well. As part of the athletics fee elimination compromise, students saw the evaporation of 500 of their seats in Assembly Hall. The "self-serving perks" of IUSA's budget also caught attention in the form of a mass e-mail, although that's not a recent development. The sorest spots were that Shortle noted how unprepared Vote for Pedro was in taking the helm of student leadership at IU and the woefully poor attendance by congressional representatives at IUSA meetings.\nWhile IUSA stumbled at times, kudos deserves to go to Shortle and his administration. Their accomplishments help make the campus a more accessible place, modestly friendlier to students. The campus bus system has seen a dramatic increase in its rider numbers. The readership program, while continually and erroneously marketed as "free" as opposed to its real $2 charge, has opened student access to more national and international issues. Eliminating the athletics fee cut off what could have been a scary precedent of randomly taxing students to fix University ails.\nWe'd like to suggest the possibility that the incoming Hoosier administration could learn a thing or two from Vote for Pedro. Hoosier needs to remember that it should work actively to make the campus safer, more accessible and more convenient, but it and the students it represents should also realize its short term of office makes it impossible to wildly change the campus dynamic in a single year. It should capitalize on Vote for Pedro's successes -- the ability to represent its constituents effectively to the administration -- and learn from Vote for Pedro's failures, specifically enforcing congressional attendance and not letting the meetings wither away into a boring abyss when they can get work done.\nIt's easy to fault IUSA for perceived incompetence or aloofness, but looking back during the last year it's clear how much IUSA can actually do -- and the fallout that can ensue. Still, it's always important to bear in mind that, unlike most political campaigns, the IUSA executives' term of office is only one year, and almost four of those months are summer vacation. They don't have a vast and expansive term of office to develop and institute new plans of action; instead, they are left with picking up where previous administrations left off and pushing new initiatives for the future. To Vote for Pedro's credit, change happened.