[1114] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
TEAL/Representation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Victoria K Anderson)
Wed Mar 13 14:16:18 2002
Message-ID: <200203131908.OAA23620@m56-129-14.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 14:08:20 -0500
From: Victoria K Anderson <vkanders@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
For those who claim that "UA insiders" didn't care about moving TEAL from the
Student Center until students spoke out against it, you're right. However,
keep in mind that the "UA insiders" found out about the proposal at a UA
Council meeting a very short time before the student outcry against it started.
OBVIOUSLY we didn't do anything until the student outcry started-the outcry
started right away. Since it would have also involved a renovation to the
reading room, we needed to know if students wanted TEAL out of there if it
meant forgoing renovations to the room; however, it was clear quite quickly
that students wanted TEAL out of there regardless.
Once we gathered that we needed to push against this given what students
wanted us to do (side note: is it wrong for the UA to incorporate student
feedback into what it tries to get done? I wasn't under this impression, but
please let me know if I was wrong.), we constructed a few of our alternatives
and decided which were the most desireable. This is called keeping your
options open, and it would have been helpful if, for some reason, we had
not been able to relocate the TEAL room. Some of these options included making
the student center more attractive in spite of the presence of the TEAL room
and reserving other spaces on campus for students to study if they couldn't
use the reading room. Fortunately, we never needed these, but this is why
our discussions included items like "faster elevators in the student center."
Hopefully this explains a bit of that issue and the reasoning behind the
way that "UA insiders" approached it.
Now on the topic of the UA apparently not getting anything done, I won't even
begin to discuss what we have accomplished and worked for. However, if you
don't know what it is that we've done, we clearly aren't doing enough for you,
and I am both sorry for that and willing to help change it. However, in order
for that to happen, we need to know what is important to you and what you want
us to work on. Realize that we have minimal power and influence compared to
the decision-makers in the administration, but that we can work to get some
*reasonable* goals accomplished.
Let us know. You can reach us (the executive committee) by emailing ua@mit.edu.
Back to thesis,
Victoria
*************
Victoria K. Anderson
Speaker, MIT Undergraduate Association Council
500 Memorial Drive #428
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617)225-8828
http://web.mit.edu/vkanders/www
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