Former USG President explains what comes next.
BY:Christian Hernandez
Due to conflict between candidates and SERC in May’s student government elections (click here to read more), the results may get thrown out. In other words, there is a chance that City College will not have a student government until the semester kicks off in late August.President Lisa will come to a final decision by the end of the week – whether to leave the elections as is or to push for a re-election in the fall. In the meantime, Kenny Soto, the outgoing Undergraduate Student Government President, explains how students, clubs and organizations, student life, and City College as a whole, would suffer from a reelection in the fall.
What’s going to happen if a re-election is granted?
1) None of the clubs and organizations on campus will have access to their budget.
“SSC, the student activities fee committee, which is ran by student government members and faculty won’t be able to meet because they do not have the specific quorum for meetings. That means that [all] clubs won’t receive any budgeting or any budgets; the media board: WCCR ,The Campus Magazine, the newspaper, and SAMETV won’t receive any budget; The Volunteer Emergency Services won’t receive any budget either, and so on and so forth. NYPIRG, though they do have their members, they won’t have anyone to set their budget.”
2) There will not be any student life or campus life.
“Clubs won’t be able to set up events because the registration office will be closed. That’s a subsection of student life and they won’t have a budget to run until October because their budget is ran by the SSC committee— if there are no students on the committee, nothing can move forward.""This may resort to students using a scientific research paper writing service due to lack of time, and lack of learning. If no classes are to take place, how can you not expect them to ask somebody else to research their paper for them?".
3) Students will not have representation.
“There will be no voting on the new budgets for student government. So if there is anything that happens within those two months there is no student representation, as far as budgets go, within our resources.If a student were to have a problem and want to reach the students ombuds’ office— well, there is no student ombuds."
4) City College will not have representation.
“In our bylaws there will be an infraction: our first meeting is supposed to be September 15, so that we can send proper representation to the Undergraduate Student Senate for the entire CUNY system. CCNY will not have any representation because we will not have any student government members till October.The USS has really important meetings that affect CUNY and if we don’t have a say then we can’t determine what would happen if anything were to occur in the context of City College.”
5) There will not be cafeteria employees to prepare and serve food.
“The AEC, another budgetary committee, won’t be able to vote on new cafeteria service providers. We might not have anyone serving us food for the first two months. If we are, more than likely it’ll stay Metropolitan, though we were promised an update: either they were going to stay, or they weren’t and they were going to get someone new. So the whole point is that by staying stagnant there is no progress and they couldn’t stay on their word and deliver -- which is a really big problem.”
“A lot of club members when they read this are going to be like, ‘I never knew that all these decisions were made by student government members and because there aren’t any [student government members] we don’t get any money’,” said Soto.Though he believes that a reelection will only set City College back, he feels that it will also act as a wake up call for the student body. “Whatever decision [Pres. Lisa] makes is just going to show that the USG and GSC have a big impact on student life and students need to be more aware of it.”