Red-Hot for IUSA

Looking at the current efforts of IUSA to lobby for a statewide tax holiday on school supplies, a project that could easily span years, it’s easy to see how one bad administration can ruin the reputation of the entire organization.

On Tuesday, students will begin voting to make sure that doesn’t happen. This editorial board casts its vote for the Red-Hot ticket.

There are three tickets running this year. ONE University features a diverse list of candidates. Ben Blair, the ticket’s presidential candidate, is a graduate student at the Maurer School of Law.

The ticket claims in its platform “that a student government can do more for itself by setting reasonable, articuable goals.” But its platform is filled with typical wishful thinking – including an initiative to allow the use of meal points in the Indiana Memorial Union.

Blair set his ticket back at the IUSA candidates debate when he admitted he had not yet spoken with any IU administrators.

Btown presidential candidate Peter SerVaas is the director of student services for IUSA. His ticket draws heavily from the Kelley School of Business, featuring candidates who served both as the president and vice president of Kelley Student Government. Their platform has been simplified into five major initiatives.

But again, these are many initiatives we have heard before. They want to get students a fall break but fail to articulate why they will succeed where nearly every other IUSA administration has failed. Would their bike rental program actually be convenient when students have plenty of affordable options to purchase their own?

Andrew Hahn, the presidential candidate for the Red-Hot ticket, is the current IUSA vice president for Congress. He should know better than any other candidate how to actually get things done. Whether he clearly grasps the role of IUSA is less clear.

One of Red-Hot’s top initiatives is to create a “virtual student union.” In the debate Hahn mentioned a “silo effect” created by different social and academic cliques on campus. A new Web site, which is supposed to make it easy for students to find IU events and organizations, is unlikely to make the frat guy and the Jacobs School of Music student best friends. Busy students already have better alternatives in the form of Facebook.

When it comes to IUSA elections, there is an emphasis on hearing what students want, but a reluctance to tell them it might not be possible. That isn’t leadership.

Student representatives can be easily outvoted on every committee they sit on. In most cases IUSA can do little more than advise.

This does not mean the organization is useless – and it doesn’t mean its members do not work hard.

But it does mean tickets should stop promising a fall break or a basketball student section without being honest about why it is so hard to get them.

IUSA is important, but not in the way it often styles itself. None of the tickets running really have a wide base of support. For most students, the impact IUSA would have on their lives is too small to justify the time it would really take to get informed about the tickets.

The work of an IUSA executive is ingloriously bureaucratic. Red-Hot probably has the experience and contacts to do this work the best.

It would be a shame if they spent their time in office working on a gimmicky new Web site.