Do you know what your Student Government senators accomplished this past semester? Do you know their names or their goals? No? Me either. There is one thing I’m sure we all know: They’re most likely members of the Swamp Party.
It’s frustrating when the only thing you know about the people representing you is their party affiliation. Representatives are responsible for being visible and communicative, and ours have not been up to par.
First, let’s look at Swamp’s Facebook page. Before last week, their most recent post was Oct. 5, 2014. The party that won 49 out of 50 Senate seats in the Fall and the entire ballot in Spring 2014 went 114 days without giving us a single update from the page.
It wasn’t just a single mishap, however. Scroll down further or check their Twitter and YouTube accounts, and you’ll notice the same pattern: Swamp is only around during election time.
Fine. Maybe they prefer to update us in between elections through the SG label. Take a look at the “News” section on the Student Government website: Its most recent update was about their TapShield app — more than a year ago.
Have you heard about their UFStudentGov YouTube channel? The Fall Senate agenda is the only video that has been uploaded on that account in the last two years, and it has a total of six subscribers.
Furthermore, if you wanted to take it upon yourself and find out who your SG senators are, you could go to the SG website. Instead of pictures and biographies of our senators, we are left with a list of names and emails. The way SG presents our senators makes them distant, shady and protected from criticism. How can you hold your representatives accountable if you don’t know who they are?
Apparently our SG isn’t very tech-savvy, but they make up for it with face-to-face interaction, right? Not really. Besides seeing a Swamp tank every now and then, the senators have not been present in our community. The closest “encounter” I’ve had with my SG representatives since Fall elections was when I sat at the solar-powered tables behind the Hub, approved by Senate last year. I invite you to try them out sometime. They might look like SG billboards, but, unlike SG, they’re always available.
Anyway, where are the senator-constituent meetings or the personal relationships? SG has made somewhat of an effort with their “Lunch on the Lawn” series where you can get free Chick-fil-A with some SG representatives. However, the January lunch was announced on the SG Facebook page about 48 hours prior to the event. If they really wanted to hear every student’s voice, they wouldn’t do it through impromptu lunches.
It’s clear the way members of Swamp have managed SG has broadened the gap between SG and the student body. It would be understandable if they were working to improve, but they haven’t made much progress. We need representatives who will engage their communities the entire semester, not just the two weeks they spend campaigning on Turlington Plaza. In the coming weeks, let’s familiarize ourselves with our potential representatives and ask them to commit to being concerned, communicative and available throughout the entire semester.
Hopefully, the Access Party will prove its philosophy of transparency and Swamp will be pressured to do the same. Competition often brings out the best in people, so maybe Spring elections will produce the best SG the Gator Nation has ever had.
Christopher Wilde is a UF biochemistry freshman. His column appears on Wednesdays.
[A version of this story ran on page 7 on 2/4/2015 under the headline “SG has room for improvement"]
