Student Association President Neal Casey is working with fellow SA members to fulfill one of his major presidency goals: to fill every open representative seat in the assembly.

SA is operating at about 50 percent capacity, with 71 total seats and only 38 filled. SA has not been able to fill all of its available student representative seats for the past six years.

 Amy Snider, the SA chief of staff, said full representation is the current goal because SA is an organization that is supposed to represent the entire student body. She said SA is lacking the voices of several schools and, therefore, certain colleges are having more input on initiatives than others. As a democratic institution, ‘that’s not how it is supposed to work,’ Snider said.

SA has been internally running an unofficial competition, started between Casey and Snider, to see which member has the highest number of returned petitions from students, Snider said.

Bonnie Kong, a senior and Academic Affairs Committee chair, has been a representative since her freshman year and said this has never been SA’s goal before.

Kong emphasized the informality of the competition and said not all assembly members are partaking. Kong said she is not personally keeping track of the petitions she gives out.

Snider said although the recruitment push has been SA’s focus, there is not anything SA has sacrificed or stopped giving enough attention to.

The latest SA initiative to connect with students is tabling in the main buildings of the different home colleges and informing students. Students will also be able to give suggestions at the tables, which will allow SA to learn about what needs to be done on campus.

SA members will continue their recruitment focus throughout election season, Casey said. Elections will continue at next Monday’s SA meeting at 7:30 p.m. in Maxwell Auditorium.

Casey has been exercising his own one-on-one recruitment approach by targeting specific student leaders, especially upperclassmen because SA is currently ‘lowerclassmen-heavy,’ he said.

Casey assigned each member to recruit at least one individual to the association. But not all members are recruiting equally because of fluctuations of interest and dedication within the association, Snider said.

‘Some members are just not as attracted to recruiting as other representatives are,’ she said.

The emphasis on gaining specific numbers has caused much debate within the assembly on the idea of quality versus quantity, said PJ Alampi, the Board of Elections and Membership chair. Although it would be ideal to fill all the seats, the new members should be quality, he said.

Snider said she believes not all representative seats have been filled, in part, because of a shortcoming on SA’s end.

‘It might be that we failed on the recruitment end. We just haven’t been as prominent on campus, and we haven’t been as good as promoting ourselves as we could be,’ Snider said.

Besides students’ lack of knowledge about SA, there is also a lack of balance in the students that actually do join SA. The School of Architecture, School of Education and School of Information Studies have zero representatives. The David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics only has two.

While the College of Arts and Sciences, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and Martin J. Whitman School of Management are not full either, more members represent these schools and are closer to filling their school’s quota of seats. The L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science is the closest to full capacity with six of seven positions filled.

Kong, Academic Affairs Committee chair, attributed the imbalance to differences in the amount of student availability. She said SA has always had trouble recruiting students from the School of Architecture, specifically because heavier course loads make it difficult for them to take part in extracurricular activities.

She also said students may be more focused on student governments within their home colleges and not on the entire campus community.

Casey said that certain colleges, especially Arts and Sciences, have majors that link more to SA, which could be a reason for their heavier involvement.

‘But SA is more than just an interest in politics,’ Casey said.

Alampi, the Board of Elections and Membership chair, said that Casey wants to see increased representation for the functionality of SA and that filling every position would allow Casey to ‘leave his footprint’ on the organization’s history.

Alampi said he does not know the last time SA was operating at full capacity and doubted if it was ever full, but Casey’s recruitment push has increased numbers from last year. Alampi attributed the push for filling 100 percent of the seats strictly to Casey.

‘It is Neal’s idea, he spearheaded it. It is strictly him designing what his hopes and dreams are for the future of the assembly,’ Alampi said.

rebarill@syr.edu

Published on September 20, 2011 at 12:00 pm