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Written by: Andrew Hodgson
On February 2, SGA held a student academic forum in the Back Bay. The forum was designed to gather concerns and input from the Bentley student body on a number of academic issues. However, since no students attended the forum, the SGA had to resort to discussing issues presented by its own members.
Despite low attendance, it has been expressed that student are typically concerned about issues such as common finals without common syllabi, standardized courses that are not always standardized, and professors’ office hours.
SGA meetings are open to the public every Tuesday at 5:10 p.m., but according to SGA President junior Puja Shah, “We rarely have any guests.”
When asked why there was no student participation at the forum, Shah recognized that blame could be on both SGA and the students at large.
“I think it is just that the effort isn’t there [by students] to come to a meeting and express your concerns,” said Shah. “Moving forward we definitely will be learning from this and taking what happened on Tuesday seriously. If we are to hold a forum again, it most likely won’t be during a general board meeting, we will try and find a time that is more accommodating,” she continued.
The possibility of moving meetings in which SGA wants to solicit students’ responses to activity period is becoming a reality. “Maybe an activity period for the forum would be better than holding one during our general board meetings,” said Shah.
With the lack of student involvement in forums becoming a continual problem for SGA, Shah searched for reasons, other than the timing of the event, that these forums garner no student interest.
“We don’t know why that is. It could be students don’t know they are welcome, they don’t know the agenda, some people have said they are intimidated by our business casual dress, I don’t know exactly what it is.”
SGA did use a number of means to advertise the event. Signs were posted to notify the community, an e-mail went out announcing the event, and the SGA website and Facebook page were used to keep students in the loop.
In addition, as of this week, SGA meetings are being streamed live via the SGA website for students to watch from their dorm rooms.
The goal of the forum was to allow students to work with SGA to resolve nagging concerns that Shah says have been apparent for too long.
“We had outlined academic issues at the beginning of this semester that we really wanted to address,” said Shah. “We have an academic board and specifically they are looking to look at standardized courses and faculty student relationships, so if you are having a problem with a professor, who can you go to?”
Even with no student participation, Shah said that by no means was the forum a complete waste of time due to the fact that the board has 28 students who could all speak from personal experience.
Shah pledged that SGA would continue to work to address the academic concerns they had outlined. However, she did acknowledge that “Without having student effort, it is going to be more difficult.”
{ 1 comment }
Why don’t they do what most other groups do, and send out a survey. It may be sad, but that is most likely the way to gain the best understanding of students concerns. When making a point of complaints regarding the institution, I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable doing it non-anonymously.. maybe I’m a wimp, but I’d be willing to bet theres a large population of students who feel the same.
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