I have to laugh. For two years in a row, I have come within a hair of winning the Student Senate election, last year as an independent, and this year as part of a coalition, the Birthday Party.
I want to thank all of you within the student body who have for years supported the struggle for student power on campus, and a less bureaucratic and more creative and free university experience. I'm not upset about the loss; this never was about me. It's about building a social movement, and there's no doubt that we have started one. In fact, you have helped start one.
Students on this campus are more conscious of our position in the university and our position within the world than many of our peer universities in the United States. We have built bridges across ideologies G? we have come to the conclusion whether we are conservatives, progressives or independents, that we all have a stake in making sure students, faculty and staff are included in the decisions that are made in our community and in our university.
We now have feeling of collective ownership of our university. What we are building here is special and has not been stamped out in one election cycle. For the first time in modern Ohio University history, we have an opposition party within the Student Senate. We have come very close, nail bitingly close to winning the election two years in a row, despite our lack of history in Student Senate or a full understanding of the process.
The reality is that around 10 percent of the student body voted in the election. The kind of change we we've been talking about, that we've been dreaming about, will take a heck of a lot more people participating to see our ideas and our hopes put into practice. Whether we like it or not, we still live in a consumer society, a society in which monotony and passivity seem to have become values in of themselves. Fortunately (and I think we can see it everywhere), in national politics, within our communities and on our campus, we are demanding substantial change to the way in which we relate to institutions that affect our lives. Casting a ballot on its own will not change our daily lives; we must look for ways in which we can become engaged in the making of our own history. We are very close to seeing some profound changes in our society, and I believe the catalyst of this change will not come from any president, congress or from a factory, for that matter.
It will arise out of the university. Only here are we privileged enough to look around at the world we inherited and create an analysis about what direction we want to take our future. Setbacks should be expected in social movements, and this is not time to wallow in disengagement. If you were supporter of the Birthday Party in the election or want to become more engaged in our university community, you should seriously consider coming to our Students for a Democratic Society meeting tonight, We will be showing a 10-minute movie that will be followed by a discussion. After that, we will decide as a group what projects we want to work on next year. Students for a Democratic Society's meetings are held every Thursday at 9 p.m. in Bentley 110. I hope to see some of you there.
Concrete breeds apathy. And yet under the paving stones
the beach! ' written on a Paris wall during a student uprising in 1968.
Will Klatt is a junior media studies major.
17
Archives
