The Undergraduate Council of Students needs change. It is my desire to be candid with you about what is happening to the organization and to this university.
As many of you may know, I was elected Vice President of UCS. I am the VP of the student body, but I honestly do not feel that way. Like UCS's critics, I feel that UCS has been isolated and closed. Students feel we do not represent their particular interests. This perception deters students from attending meetings, sending us e-mails and from communicating with us, reinforcing and advancing the spiral of isolation.
UCS has implemented IPTV, brought flat screens TVs and copies of the New York Times to dining halls, offered free summer storage, advocated study abroad and advising resources, brought about a student activities fee increase, created more common rooms and 24-hour study spaces, created satellite fitness centers and much more. Much of this work goes on behind the scenes, and is performed by people whose concern is not reading their names on the front page of The Herald. As UCS moves forward, we need to widen the scope of our thinking and improve our interactions among students, so that the work of your elected representatives (and mine, too) is pursuing goals that we, the student body, lay out.
There are problems here at Brown. Some are practical and hinge on money and university priorities. I do not know one person who does not want bigger cups in the Ratty or who is really happy with Residential Life, meal plans, dorm life or Brown's current speaking venues. Other problems are abstract, and, while less visible, even more serious: changing admissions standards, movement toward an emphasis on the Graduate School and surreptitious attacks on Brown's culture and our administration's effort to make us a poorer Harvard. On all of these issues, however, UCS cannot effectively represent students if we don't hear from you.
UCS has relationships with administrators and the influence to produce change. Most of you have ideas, suggestions and probably problems and gripes, too. But we can only be effective when you are willing to guide us. Come to meetings Wednesday 8 p.m. in Peturutti. Email us (or me at townsend@brown.edu). Stop us on the Green. If you talk to us, we will match your intensity and interest, and we will devote our time to your issues.
Without student support, UCS's power is small. It's a simple and boring dance: UCS complains, the administration says no, and students and UCS members alike sit on our asses and grumble. But we can do more. Given the magnitude of the issues facing our campus, why can't there be 3,000-signature-petitions on President Simmons's desk or 30 people sitting in Vice President for Campus Life and Student Services David Greene's office at all times? We need to start acting like a student body that has power. To do anything less is to go quietly into our graduations, and to leave Brown no better - perhaps even worse - than we found it. To those who say students do not care, are too complacent, apathetic and insulated, I can only reply that recent evidence around the plus/minus issue suggests otherwise. Many of us care about this university, both its past and its future; we need to secure both with action in the present.
If UCS and the student body do not use their powerful instruments of change - our sheer numbers, our undying love for Brown, our unique perspective, our energy and passion - then years of student activism will be forgotten, and we will watch from the far side of commencement as our alma mater ceases to make us proud. Retribution will not limp in catching up with our mistakes and in 20 years those things that we value in Brown - our unique curriculum, student body and culture - may all be gone.
They say that decisions are made by those who show up. This semester, we're showing up. Will we see you there?
Zachary Townsend '08 finally shaved, displacing a family of birds.
