The Geneseo Student Association organized an Open Forum (flyer pictured above) for students to have a formal discussion with administration about current campus issues. Many concerns were previously answered in The Lamron, but were reiterated due to the newspaper’s lack of student readers (photo courtesy of the student association).
I attended the Campus Conversation Open Forum on Thursday Feb. 13. I sat on the floor because there weren’t any chairs, amazed and excited at how many people demonstrated initiative to engage with the administration over recent issues. I was quickly disappointed, however, in the campus community as the forum progressed.
As the news editor for The Lamron, I watched the event unfold as a reporter. I intended, and still intend, to write an objective article about the subject. But here, I hope to shed light on what I believe to be an important concern.
At this open forum, students were the driving force of conversation. I sat on the wooden ballroom floor and watched a microphone make its way around the room. In the hands of different students, a pattern of concerns emerged.
My main concerns lie within the discussion of Milne’s extended closure. I am a junior who loved sitting in the basement of the library next to the big window. It was my favorite place to study. Beyond being an educational environment, the library genuinely felt like the heart of the college.
Upon hearing of the extended closure of Milne, I was certainly angry. I know everybody is frustrated. I also feel that everyone on campus agrees that the administration is evidently in the wrong, in both their communication and direct responses to the issue.
As I watched students “roast” the administrative officials responding to questions, I was honestly embarrassed. The open forum shouldn’t have been a formal meeting place for students to be aggressive, but rather a place for constructive criticism.
We aren’t going to prevent the administration from following through on a $35 million renovation that they lobbied for. We aren’t going to get a tuition adjustment. Our grades for the next four years won’t be weighted.
Instead of students asking questions like “Why would you renovate the library?” I would have rather heard constructive discussion regarding what steps the administration is taking to create silent study spaces.
At this point, I think we should move past our anger and work together as a community to foster effective solutions. For example, many department heads have already taken the initiative to open additional study spaces.
I know this because I wrote an article that ran two issues ago in The Lamron. The article itself includes 10 different sources; a variety of sourcing and information that wasn’t previously available to students.
Yet, minutes into the forum, it was obvious that nobody read it. I watched as a microphone amplified the voices of concerned students posing questions to the administration that I had already answered for them. I do not serve as a force of local news for my own welfare; I hope that people read what I write.
My frustration only grew as I watched students ask questions about what was known to the crowd as the “Twitter issue.”
The editor-in-chief and managing editor of The Lamron spent hours compiling enough information to write an article—they interviewed multiple people. There is a wealth of information presented in that article.
In both the Twitter and Milne articles that ran in Issue 13, there lies a plethora of information regarding two important campus issues. Yet, I don’t believe a single person at the open forum read either.
The editor-in-chief, the managing editor and I did not spend the time compiling information about pressing campus issues for our own benefit. Rather, we hope to inform the campus community.
With this information, students can probe administration further at events like the open forum, voice opinions and ask questions that hopefully generate answers to the questions that administrators refused to answer when in communication with The Lamron.
Instead of asking, “Why did you hack into a student’s email?” in regard to the Twitter dispute, a student who read The Lamron would ask “Why, in an unprecedented move, did Twitter provide a small, western New York college’s communications department access to a meme account?”
This would have been a question that I would have loved to have heard answered in front of 200 students. Instead, I heard a verbatim response to the question Julia Skeval, Kara Burke and I posed to David Irwin when we sat down with him two weeks prior.
Students sat in a crowded ballroom on a Thursday evening, posing questions and proudly presenting insults to a group of administrators that are almost constantly in contact with The Lamron news staff over issues we believe students are passionate about.
Emma Boskovski is a communication major junior who loves news.