No one's listening to you, IU

Thomas Reilly Jr., chairman of the IU Board of Trustees, is a super funny guy.

When two student leaders came before him expressing concern, claiming that student members of committees don’t have enough time to familiarize themselves with the committee’s work and affect change before their term ends, his response was to crack a joke.

“That’s part of our strategy to deal with you,” he said.

Reilly’s board might be chuckling. The Editorial Board is not.

The fact it occurs to Reilly to make such a comment — joke or otherwise — is the perfect example of what’s so wrong at this University.

Reilly went on, like any good paternalist speaking to his disenfranchised charges, to admit the trustees “exist to educate students,” and therefore, need strong sources of student input.

He’s wrong.

Reilly was first appointed to the Board of Trustees by Gov. Mitch Daniels in 2005. In total, six of IU’s nine trustees are appointed by the state’s governor, including one student trustee. The other three are elected by alumni.

Current students never vote for a trustee. Not once.

The IU Board of Trustees does not exist to educate students under its current structure. It exists to satisfy the governor and the alumni. The extent to which the board exists to educate students is only the extent to which those otherwise-occupied constituencies demand it.

That’s why student input on committees, the kind Reilly shrugged off with a joke, is so vital to our existence as members of this community.

It’s why IU Student Association President Jose Mitjavila’s administration’s initial failure to fill seven of those positions is so egregious.

The student affairs subcommittee of the Bloomington Faculty Council went more than two months without a single student member. The responsibility to fill that position was Mitjavila’s.

Unlike the Graduate and Professional Student Organization, which opens committee appointment to all its constituents, IUSA precedent is to appoint only members of the current administration’s staff to committees.

That means no matter how you voted in the last IUSA election, only the winning executive ticket will ever have any meaningful interaction with University issues.

Provost Lauren Robel said in Friday’s IDS investigation article this isn’t a problem she or Dean of Students Harold Goldsmith or the Trustees should be responsible for solving. This is just another case of the epidemic of disdain for the average student at this University.

Its chief academic officer and the dean charged with student welfare don’t feel responsible for ensuring that students have any seat at the table, let alone a seat representative of the fact that this University exists mainly for their benefit.

That’s your student government’s responsibility, and if your student government is systematically hobbled by the very process it’s supposed to be participating in, well, that’s just part of their strategy to deal with it.

This University’s function is to educate students, even Reilly and his trustees ostensibly agree to that fact. But if that’s the case, why are students and student governors scrambling to keep up with an administration that is working on a schedule and pace so harshly dissonant from their own?

If student input is so valuable and important, shouldn’t it be the other way around?

It should be the administration and trustees bending over backwards to ensure students are able to attend committee meetings. They should be developing orientation programs designed to make student committee members effective contributors as quickly as possible.

Pairing new student appointees with a veteran committee member would be a start.

This year, demand real, tangible change from your student government. Demand that committee positions be filled quickly with students genuinely interested in the issues the committees deal with. Make it a major campaign issue.

The provost, the deans, the trustees — they’ve already made it clear they’re not going to listen to our voices unless we work for it, unless you push for it, unless you make your voice so loud and important they can’t function without listening to it.

They say there’s a student government system in place for you to be heard. That system is broken. The problem is they have no incentive to fix it.

Force that to change. Because our apathy and inertia are a part of their strategy to deal with us.

It’s time we developed a strategy to deal with them.

­— opinion@idsnews.com
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