The Student Association’s time is up.

There has been more than enough time for SA to increase its representative membership, which it has, and to raise its standing amongst student groups, especially the smaller ones. (The budget meetings went quite smoothly last year.)

Now it’s time for action from the assembly, and to see president Wayne Horton make good on all those campaign promises he made last November. There’s no doubt SA really started moving forward at the beginning of this session, but that progress has slowed to a trickle.

The biggest news to come out of the assembly so far this semester is a possible new logo for the student readership program. You know, just in case we have a hard time spotting out the newspaper racks near the entrance of each residence hall. Or the boxes in Schine. Or the ones in every other major academic building on campus. Finally, we can read our news with some flair! That New York Times flag is so 1851.

Some real progress was shown last summer, however, when SA booked Al Gore to speak. Unfortunately, as those who attended the event last week found out, Gore wouldn’t shut up about how we’re turning the Earth into ‘Waterworld’ and creating fish people with gills behind their ears who can swim faster than your average dolphin. Kevin Costner would be so proud.

And that’s it. Other than those two things, SA has done little to nothing this semester to directly benefit the students, besides of course the things they have to do, such as emergency funding of student organizations. It would be nice to see them go a little beyond that and deal with some of the issues that concern students.

Already we have seen laundry prices in residence halls go up a quarter, but there has been no mention of questioning it by SA members. There are still incidents of robberies on and off campus.

During his campaign in November, Horton promised to find a way to keep Kimmel, and possibly Goldstein, open later on weeknights. I expected that by now I would be munching down my chicken quesadilla and two hard tacos at 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday while not writing my paper for NEW 405 that was due four days ago. It’s SA’s job to make sure the Syracuse University administration knows students want these things fixed.

Horton and the rest of the SA assembly only have until November to make things happen before they all become lame ducks and the new session transitions in. Let’s see if they can be the first ones to pull it off.

Steven Kovach is an English and textual studies and newspaper journalism major whose columns appear weekly in The Daily Orange. You can email him at sjkovach@gmail.com.

Published on September 24, 2006 at 12:00 pm