We don’t vote for the prime minister of Australia or even the governor of Nevada (unless you’re from there), and rightly so. The issues and concerns of the people in these places don’t affect us.
But, along similar lines, most students wandering from class to class may have seen the Associated Students Inc.’s (ASI) most recent, highly-publicized project asking students to act in a way that is totally contrary to any kind of reasonable logic. ASI is encouraging students to vote for something that won’t affect most of us: the proposed Recreation and Wellness Center.
The proposed rec center would be a 125,000 square foot facility set to open in fall 2010. Among the new features would be a “new weight lifting/cardio equipment area, several basketball, volleyball, and badminton courts, multi-purpose dance/group fitness rooms, an indoor jogging track and a rock climbing wall,” according to the “Let’s Talk About Rec” pamphlets being distributed by ASI.
All of this sounds great, but it comes at a steep price. The new center would cost $110 extra per semester on top of tuition, which is set to increase in the near future and will certainly be much higher in the next three years.
Current students have no right to assume that people in the future will want something and vote for it, regardless of the amount of surveys and studies conducted on public opinion. It’s simply not possible to anticipate the desires of those attending Cal State Long Beach in the future. By 2010 many, and arguably most, of us will have graduated or transferred to other schools, sticking the newcomers with the expensive bill of a huge new complex that they may not have wanted.
This is, of course, a bit of a catch-22, because the decisions for new expensive projects should be decided by the students, but, ideally, all undergraduate students should graduate in four years. Four years is very short time to get new projects done.
In an e-mail correspondence with the communications coordinator representative of ASI Teresa Ruiz, she explained the reasoning behind the vote as the current students providing a future for students in the future.
“[ASI] trust[s] that current students will have their future peers’ best interest at heart. They are students themselves and understand what students need/want in a college experience. The same is true for this student rec center election. Today’s students, not university officials, should be able to decide if a center will be built in the future,” Ruiz wrote.
Regardless of our intentions for future students, how we vote will not affect us. It will affect future students for generations. If students pass the proposed rec center, fees for the center would continue for 30 years, adjusting for inflation every three years, according to an article published in the Feb. 19 issue of the Daily Forty-Niner.
Also, ASI’s primary source being used to promote the construction of the rec center is a survey conducted in 2005. But, according to an article in the May 15, 2006, issue of the Daily Forty-Niner, about 1,000 of the votes from the online survey conducted by ASI were manipulated by students hacking into the university computer system. Who knows how the one-in-eight invalid votes artificially inflated the survey?
Our view on the matter? Don’t vote. It’s just not our right.
