Helen ZhangIt’s autumn, the leaves are falling, and First-Year Council (FYC) is finally showing up for campus — albeit, late. The University of Alberta’s Student Union (UASU) has officially slated FYC’s first meeting for October 26 with their 20 members. Since its inception in May, this project has used velocity as its defining feature. Logan West, vice-president (operations and finance) (VPOF) and Susan Huseynova, vice-president (academic) (VPA), have been the ones shoehorning this project into actuality. Its timeline, also mentioned in May, was neat and tidy, and everything felt in order. But as we approach the end of October, FYC seems to be lost, not only in its timeline but in its scope as well.
The point of FYC is to give first-year students a voice on “issues that matter most to them.” Conceptually, FYC is a great idea. Giving students who have a fresh perspective on campus a voice is important. Watching how FYC was going to be implemented started out as real excitement. But as the seasons have started to change, FYC has been losing its footing.
The biggest outlier of FYC is the fact that it is not at all similar to the rest of Students’ Council. There are up to 28 members of Students’ Council. This includes officers of council, the executive team, and faculty councillors. At the time of writing this (prior to the fall by-election), Students’ Council is short seven members, bringing the current total to 21. FYC planned to have anywhere from 10-20 members. But the actual number will be right at the max — 20. This means that FYC will have nearly as many members as there are actual councillors. That being said, FYC is meant to be a non-voting and informative group of first-year students, not a voting powerhouse in Students’ Council. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be a mess.
Students’ Council and the UASU Executive Committee running with one person in each position is its best feature. Having just one representative streamlines everything for everyone. Even faculty councillors with one to three members per faculty makes sense. But, 20 FYC members just feels like too many. While it’s good to have a large collection of voices and opinions, they shouldn’t all be heard at once. It is simply a very unproductive way of conducting processes like these. More than that, would this engagement in Students’ Council really be as valuable as the Executive Committee believes it will be? Likely not.
Students’ Council is designed to let any student at the U of A voice their concerns and opinions where appropriate. It often feels like no one knows about Students’ Council even with the schedule posted to the UASU website. To then create this new student-body to fill this attendance gap makes sense only if the attendance of first-years alone was low. Unfortunately, attendance across all demographics is low.
The better, and probably even easier alternative to FYC, is to advertise Students’ Council to the student population. This wouldn’t mean a massive spike in attendance, but it’s sure to catch the eyes of at least a few students. Everyone always has problems with the U of A (just scroll the uAlberta subreddit). Students clearly want to show up and be active participants, but don’t always know how. So by advertising Students’ Council as a place to voice concerns, it could become much more productive for everyone. But, that has yet to happen, and instead we have FYC.
FYC simply does not make a strong enough argument for its existence. The Stride Campaign School at the U of A is a group already dedicated to representing underrepresented groups on campus. In the past, Stride has been a go-to for new and underrepresented student involvement. But Stride has not been actively discussed at all by this Executive Team. Instead, FYC was created to fill a gap that didn’t need filling.
It’s clear that the Executive Committee cares about getting more students on campus involved in student politics. It is also clear that engagement and advocacy are important. But the execution of these desires is in the wrong place. Even though the advocacy on Course Materials Access (CMA) was done with a nice touch of humour and Week of Welcome (WoW) had a lot of great events for new students, there is room for learning. Latching onto a project like FYC should have been a learning experience, not a “win” for the Executive Committee. This is especially the case when it has been falling behind schedule.
FYC was announced in May by General Manager Marc Dumouchel in collaboration with VPOF. In this announcement, they included a timeline for the project. Its completion date was set for early October. Moreover, in June, when West brought forth the First Principles for FYC, they stood by this timeline and said it would be up and running by “late September.” But this seems to have been moved to October 26.
From August 18 to October 20, FYC was only brought up one time by VPA through their September report. In this report, all that was noted was the advocating being done for FYC and but nothing more. There were two months that found students being left in the dark about where FYC was on the timeline. Some students even posed questions earlier in October wondering what was happening with FYC. All that was met with silence. But now, after waiting longer than planned, FYC has established their first meeting for October 26 with all 20 members. Nitpicking a timeline, though, only does so much.
It would be wrong to say the Executive Committee is not a busy group of individuals. There is grace to be given here on the timeline. It’s not always easy to know what a project will look like when you’re in the planning stages. But in all this, there’s a time to know when to let a project go.
Engagement, advocacy, involvement — at some point, these buzzwords begin to feel numb. FYC was meant as a project that encapsulates all of these words but instead a silent void was left in its place for far too long. While a lot of work has gone into FYC, it seems this energy could have been better used elsewhere. Advocating for Stride or Students’ Council would have been a better start. If those didn’t work, then maybe FYC would have been the right call — only if it reduced the number of members involved. For the time being, FYC having been behind schedule, and loose in its interpretation of use, finds itself in a strange boundary of useful uselessness.
