Staff editorial: Time is of the essence

The SGA is making a habit of wasting students' time.    

First, on Feb. 24, the Student Government Association failed to reach a consensus on whether to support Gov. Martin O'Malley's proposed 3 percent tuition increase. A few days later, it voted to oppose the minor increase based on "principle." Then, at the SGA's annual lobbying day in Annapolis, many members refused to accept the advice of university President Dan Mote to grudgingly accept the increase in an attempt to preserve a smidgen of credibility while talking to legislators. And now, a few weeks after this whole rigmarole began, SGA President Steve Glickman wrote a column yesterday accepting the tuition increase and saying he testified in support of the Governor's budget because it is "our best case scenario."

In the past three weeks, the SGA has rejected a bill supporting the tution increase, rejected a bill opposing it, supported a bill opposing it and now the organization's president is saying he will support it.

If the SGA wanted to have an impact on the tuition increase, it should have taken a stand in the fall, when the governor was shaping his budget. Once the legislative session began and O'Malley submitted his budget, it was too late. Could the SGA's stand have made a difference? The fiscal and political realities make it difficult to imagine, but it's possible.

But instead of thinking about the budget, the SGA was working on an infeasible plan to make student IDs double as SmarTrip cards. Glickman declared this his top priority, and spent months working on an impossible-to-implement plan that WMATA seemingly had zero interest in and that would have done little to encourage students to travel to Washington. Finally, Glickman gave up on the plan, citing the turmoil surrounding Metro General Manager John Catoe's resignation as the reason.

And this week, the SGA is going to debate whether to impeach City Council Liaison Jonathan Sachs, a former student body president. The official reason? Sachs hasn't attended the required number of legislative meetings, which he admits. The actual reason? Pettiness from a group of students who, for whatever reason, have been trying to demonize Sachs for nearly a year. Sachs was far from a perfect SGA president, and we criticized him harshly in these pages. But this move isn't motivated by actual concern for students, it's motivated by a desire to embarrass  Sachs.

All of these things show this year's SGA has a disturbing tendency to waste time on meaningless or fruitless efforts that were destined for failure from the beginning.

We're not condemning everything the SGA has done. Events like the speaker series and CrabFest went off without a hitch, and students enjoyed them. They streamlined the funding process for student groups, and decided this year to cut their own budget by about $80,000. Even minor steps like opening a room for stranded student groups have been productive. And the SGA ultimately made strong responses to two major campus issues: Glickman got Provost Nariman Farvardin to agree to allow for more student influence on several committees, and their advocacy for Engaged University, while it failed, was a noble effort. This SGA has done a lot of good work, and its members, by and large, have worked hard for students.

But it's the work the SGA has wasted that troubles us. What could they have done with the time they spent on the SmarTrip initiative? Could time they spent talking about the tuition freeze in Annapolis been better spent discussing the Higher Education Investment Fund?

The portrait these incidents paint is of a group that, while well-intentioned, has  a tendency to fly off track, often because a lone member has a goal he stubbornly pursues long past the point at which it makes sense.

It's time certain SGA members stop focusing on their egos and start focusing on actually helping students.