Mackenzie Mertikas and Sameeha Saied were sworn in as president and vice president of the 63rd legislative session of Syracuse University’s Student Association last April. They’ve been working throughout the summer to organize the year’s agenda, but SU’s student body still has yet to hear from them, aside from the cabinet applications announcement over the summer. That needs to change.

Mertikas and Saied ran a campaign based on five principles: diversity and inclusion, financial accessibility, accountability and transparency, health and wellness, and community engagement. Those principles show considerable promise, but we need to know much more.

Students want to know what SA stands for, and they want to know what the organization will do to hold itself accountable. They want to know who is representing their interests.

SA’s student leaders can start by establishing open lines of communication. This year’s first-year and transfer students might not know who their student representatives are or what those representatives even do. It’s up to SA to reach out and answer those questions. It’s up to SA to establish those critical relationships. And it’s up to SA to show students that they want to hear from them.

A fundamental part of establishing those relationships with students will depend on the organization’s ability to recover from a tumultuous spring election cycle that saw a series of public relations snafus. SA’s new leadership has committed to improving internal culture at the association, but we want to see the product of those efforts firsthand.

That kind of relationship-building means that Mertikas and Saied, and the newly appointed cabinet accompanying them, have to propose specific measures to address student concerns. It’s time those proposals give way to substantive policy.

Mertikas and Saied have been working to set a date for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week, but they haven’t told us what we can expect beyond that. Advocating for mental health and wellness is admirable, but we need to know what SA will do this year that prior administrations haven’t. And we need to know how our student representatives plan to keep those goals a priority.

SA also needs to do some clarifying. What does financial accessibility mean? What finances are we talking about, and whose access to them are we working to expand?

Communicating answers doesn’t take much — a campus-wide email, a social media post — but it can prove critical in fostering the connection we deserve to have with the students representing us.

We commend the president for using the summer to prepare for the year, but the student body should hear some of those plans.

SA is an organization made up of people. We want them to represent us professionally and passionately, but we want them to be people too. We want to hear from them and know who they are. We want to know why they fight for the things they do.

And we want them to know the same things about us as the student body — who we are, what we stand for, what we want for our university. We’re hopeful for the team, who seemed eager and organized in the spring.

Mertikas and Saied ran a powerful campaign and they’ve worked hard to plan the year ahead. We want them to deliver on their promises of transparency and embody the representative voice students have been calling for.

The Daily Orange Editorial Board serves as the voice of the organization and aims to contribute the perspectives of students to discussions that concern Syracuse University and the greater Syracuse community. The editorial board’s stances are determined by a majority of its members. You can read more about the editorial board here. Are you interested in pitching a topic for the editorial board to discuss? Email opinion@dailyorange.com.

 

Published on August 28, 2019 at 10:28 pm

Contact: opinion@dailyorange.com