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GUEST COLUMNIST: OPINION: In Mali, teaching and also learning

(06/29/00 9:00am)

While many Penn students left campus after their exams to being internships or travel on their own, a few departed Philadelphia to participate in service projects across the globe. Among these few, 26 fellow Penn students and I boarded an Air France plane and wound our way to Bamako, Mali, in the heart of sub-saharan West Africa.

https://www.thedp.com/article/2000/06/guest_columnist_opinion_in_mali_teaching_and_also_learning

GUEST COLUMNIST: Last year's UA: bracing for impact

(04/16/98 9:00am)

Her first assertion is that anyone who is involved in a Student Activities Council-funded activity has felt the impact of SAC. What has SAC done for these groups besides allocated their funding? If doling out money creates an impact, then the UA has trumped SAC: the UA has an annual allocation budget of just over $1 million, compared to SAC's budget of approximately $300,000 allocated by the UA. In addition, according to Lynn Moller, SAC's financial administrator, the SAC executive board does not even use up all the money it has to divide up among SAC's member groups ("SAC has huge reserve fund," DP, 4/2/98). Even if you include SAC's continually growing reserve fund, its total resources still do not exceed the annual budget of the UA. Perhaps the impact Scanlon speaks of is a cash shortage brought on by SAC's incredibly conservative allocation policies. But let's leave aside monetary allocations for a minute and analyze what the UA actually has accomplished. Perhaps I should begin by admitting that, as a UA member for the past year, I feel that the UA has not accomplished nearly as much as it could have this year. We were bogged down, especially this semester, by attendance problems and general apathy. However, I do not believe that the UA deserves the amount of criticism it has received. That said, I find it surprising that Scanlon says she hasn't felt the impact of the UA. I guess, then, she did not notice the lights put up on Locust Walk in December, a direct result of efforts by former UA Vice-Chairperson Samara Barend. Scanlon also must not have participated in December's Winterfest, a Locust Walk event coordinated by UA member and Wharton sophomore Dan Kryzanowski with the UA's Student Life Committee. And she must not be one of the over 200 students who benefited from College junior Clive Correia's use of UA funding to advertise the Wallflowers tickets, which he convinced Drexel to sell the UA for $10 instead of $15. Since Scanlon is not a Quad resident, I'll forgive her for failing to notice College freshman Mike Bassik's effort to improve drainage, even though it was featured in a DP article. Perhaps she also missed last week's UA-sponsored Health Fair, where many students received massages to ease the stress of midterms. In addition, she must not have noticed the UA's ad soliciting nominations for the first-ever UA police awards, which Executive Vice President John Fry called "a wonderful idea." The UA has accomplished all this in only the last year, and yet Scanlon asserts that most students have not felt the effects of the UA since her freshman year. Apparently she has forgotten about Barend's initiative last year to expand meal plan options and start express lunch service. Should the UA really be more concerned with getting its name slapped on different initiatives, or should it be committed to helping the students, whether or not they realize it? Scanlon seems to believe that the former should take precedence, but I believe the latter is more important. She also argues that the only time the UA represented her interests to the administration this year was in regard to the vending ordinance this spring. I seem to recall, however, a little tiff in the fall involving the University's facilities management and a company named Trammell Crow. There, the UA and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly worked together to make sure that student interests were taken into account. Perhaps Scanlon also does not use the University's recreational facilities. Otherwise she might have cared to read the DP's headline article about the UA's petition to force the administration to double the size of Gimbel Gymnasium. While all of these accomplishments are great and show that the UA has not wasted the entire year, they do not show evidence of a cohesive body with concrete objectives. Many of these initiatives were undertaken by individual UA members using their positions to help the students. What the UA needs is a more pro-active stance toward issues involving undergraduates. The executive board should make sure that each and every representative is involved in at least one of the UA's projects. The UA should also initiate more co-sponsored activities with the other branches of student government. And it needs to make sure that its meetings are productive discussions, and not a waste of representatives time. The members of the recently-elected UA are fully capable of setting these goals and committing to carrying out the necessary steps to achieve them. And once the UA has reformed itself as a body, it will have more respect among the administration, putting the body in a better position to influence University policy decisions. That will be something the entire student body -- including Liz Scanlon -- can be proud of.

https://www.thedp.com/article/1998/04/guest_columnist_last_years_ua_bracing_for_impact

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