I sat down with the President of Student Government for an interview. Here it is:
Third Rail: My first question, as a student, what do you believe the role of student government should be?
Jolanta Smulski: Well, the easiest way to answer that question would be by thinking about before I actually got involved with Student Government. To be honest, I didn’t really care about Student Government because I didn’t think it actually did anything. I saw some signs about some scholarships, and I knew that they donated $20,000 a year for students to buy textbooks, but I didn’t really know anything; the kind of administration they have, how well they promote themselves, if they really put themselves out there to the students. I don’t think that the Student Government at the time was doing that. So I didn’t recognize them at all.
TR: Before you joined you knew we had a student government, even though it wasn’t really public. Did you have an idea about what role Student Government should hold in the hierarchy of the school?
JS: Definitely. I felt that Student Government should really represent students by being in constant contact with faculty and administration and students; by maintaining a dialogue between all three groups. It’s hard to maintain that communication between all three groups, especially when the faculty and the administration don’t get along.
TR: Now, as the Student Government President, what do you think the role of student government should be?
JS: When I joined Student Government, I wanted actually three things. One was to get more students involved. Number two, to change the constitution because I think it is very limiting, it limits our role [Student Government’s] entirely. Three, to push for the Student Activity Fee to be increased. Which is kind of controversial. I recognize that a lot of very important groups are funded by the Student Activity Fee, and are not sustainable by the current Student Activity Fee. I would hate to see less sports teams, less group fitness classes offered. I would hate to see less clubs, or for the Health & Wellness center to shut down, or. the Child Care Center. It’s a tragedy how the economy is affecting us at CSI. That’s something I’m really passionate about.
TR: You said you would like to see more student involvement. How would you like to see the student body get more involved?
JS: Well I would like to model things after what Baruch College is doing. The way they utilize Facebook is amazing! They have two different groups. one, called USG of Baruch, and then another one called Party With Baruch. they both have a thousand or more members. They have so many people interacting with them online. The USG Facebook group posts videos of their meetings, interviews with the different officers, And the Party with Baruch, is run by two people who take pictures of events. They kind of make it like a hip thing to go to an event; you’ll photographed, you’ll see your picture on facebook, you know what I mean? It allows people to visualize what these events are like, and it makes them want to be part of it. I would love to see that kind of involvement here, and the way they pushed that was through social media.
TR: Do you think we have such little involvement in this school because we are considered a commuter school?
JS: Yeah, sure. If we had dorms students would stay on campus and go to these events. They would start clubs, they would get involved, they would go to a game. Stuff like that. So that definitely plays a huge factor. I know that if there were more people who were more interested in getting students involved, then it could definitely happen.
TR: Do you also think that the things that do happen on campus aren’t very well advertised? For example, Student Government hosted a contest for a mural in the Game-Room, but I had heard that it was canceled because only one person had submitted a design.
JS: Oh no, it wasn’t canceled! We actually had two submissions after a period of about a month. We had two competing ones. I don’t know who the winner is yet, but we saw the designs and they were excellent.
TR: What do you think would be a good way for Student Government and the college in general to advertise the events that go on here? Often, we won’t hear about an event until the day after it has happened.
JS: Yeah, that’s right. That happend to me a lot, until I started researching all the events myself. Basically, I would take my planner, I would go on CSItoday.com, CFAshows.com, collegiatelink.net and CSIdolphins.com and I would just fill up my planner. It wasn’t easy. Everything is spread out, and I thought what if I did this for everybody? What if I made this cool calendar where I could compile all these different websites together, and just give it to people? Tell them where they can get concrete details about events. That’s how Time Out CSI was born. The Student Government Newsletter.
TR: The Office of Student Life has two TVs facing the entrance of the Campus Center. Can the various clubs and organizations get a flyer that can be displayed on those TVs as advertisements?
JS: Clubs actually can submit a flyer, and Greg Brown [in the Office of Student Life, 1C-201] will put it on the screens down there. The problem is whether the clubs do that or not. It’s up to each individual entity to do that or not.
TR: Do you feel that the current Student Government Constitution is limiting?
JS: Yes, yes it is. Mostly, it has to do with how people are elected. I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate losing people on Student Government! The main issue is that we have these 25 positions, yet, in order to replace people, we have to wait months according to the constitution. If we lose people between June and October, we have to wait all the way till November to elect new people to fill those positions.
TR: Really, there’s no provision for an emergency election?
JS: No! And if we lose people between November and February, we have to wait till February to fill those seats. If we lose some seats in February after the mid-term elections, then those seats will stand empty. I think that’s ridiculous! It should be just like CSI Association, where if you lose the person, then whoever [was the] runner up in the general election takes that seat. It should be that way. But it doesn’t work that way. I don’t know what the people who drew up the Constitution were thinking. Can you believe that [Student Government’s] Constitution was just approved by the Board of Trustees? They drew it five, six years ago! I can’t believe that there’s such a gap that the current Student Government has to deal with what people wanted back then. You know what I mean? It just hurts our ability to get things done, or to hold quorum for meetings. That’s the most important thing that needs to be changed.
TR: Any other things about the constitution you find limiting?
JS: A lot of people find that how the seats are proportioned, Freshman vs. Sophomore vs. Senior, also Graduate Students, they don’t like it. For example, I don’t think it’s enough to just have one Grad-student represent the entire program. I know that the current Graduate Senator has told me he feels like he doesn’t have any peer support, because we don’t know what he’s going through. We don’t know what it’s like for a grad student to pay for Graduate School, or to try to find the funds for that. It’s a completely different ball game than it is for Bachelor’s Degrees. I wish we could have one more grad student.
TR: You mentioned the proposed increase of the Student Activity Fee which is a very controversial subject. Would it effectively require a tuition increase?
JS: No. It’s completely independent of the tuition. The Student Activity Fee for full time students is seventy four dollars. As you know, the Board of Trustees increased the tuition by five percent. That’s what’s changed; the Student Activity Fee didn’t change at all. It’s completely independent; it actually hasn’t changed in eleven years, which is why it’s not sustainable. And it can only be increased every ten years. The next Student Activity Fee increase you would see, if it happens this year, is in ten years from now.
TR: What do you think would be a good target number to have the Student Activity Fee increased to?
JS: Personally, I think it should be raised by twenty five dollars. The Student Activity Fee is proportioned by group, right? Each has a certain percentage; Sports & Recreation gets the most, Student Government …. I don’t know if we actually get the second most, but it’s somewhere up there. Then you have Child Care, Health & Wellness, Clubs, CAB, etc. A solid increase, and all the groups would get the help they need. We’d all be able to continue. We have some really excellent programs that WSIA radio, what they’re doing for students is amazing! They’re letting students work in a radio station, and learn about radio stations; DJing, music technology, music engineering. I don’t know how many other CUNYs have that. That’s just awesome. I think that makes us very unique to have such a great opportunity. So I wouldn’t want to see the radio station shut down.
TR: There are a lot of programs that Student Government offers to help the student body, such as scholarships. Please, tell us more about them?
JS: We have scholarships that are offered through the academic departments, and we’ve increased the number of scholarships this year to nine. This time there are nine different academic departments that are giving these scholarships. What basically happens is that the faculty of that department determines a student that is doing extremely well in their classes, and awards that student the scholarship. Also, we do essay contests through the different commissions; Student Services, Academic & Co-Curricular Affairs especially. Students have to just submit essays, and the contests are excellent. They can be up to a thousand dollars towards your tuition, and it’s not just a blank check. It does go towards your tuition, and if you’re graduating you do get the money too.
TR: These scholarships, there’s a limited number and they only tend to benefit a small portion of the student body. What does Student Government do for the student body as a whole? What programs are there for everybody else?
JS: What we actively do through the commissions is organize a whole series of events in collaboration with the Office of Student Life and CAB. Every month we have some events going on, and we invite the whole student body to participate. We also welcome students to come to our meetings, because we always want their input directly. We want them to be part of the discussion, be part of the conversation and tell us what’s missing. Actually, a section in the newsletter that I started is called “Dear SG.” It’s very simple and to the point; we get love letters and hate mail. That’s what I like to call it. We get letters about the coffee hour which we offer every single night of the week; free coffee to all students. If they’re taking day classes, night classes, it doesn’t matter. If they’re on campus, they can drop by. Sometimes we even have food, and students love writing about it. We get so many letters about it. We’re always connecting students to different clubs, different organizations on campus. We are the ones who help students start a club in the first place, and we help students create a group for them. We don’t discriminate; you can start any kind of club you want, as long as it follows the rules. It has to be open to all students and you have to have at least five officers and ten members. That’s it. We actually fund a lot of different programs on campus that are not organized by our office. The Finance Commission gets proposals every month for things like the new student orientation, I know over the years we’ve sponsored a lot of cultural events on campus. So whenever we get proposals from students, we help them do it. We provide a great service to students.
TR: What are your views on student rights?
JS: I don’t think we have a problem with student rights, but we do definitely need to push for improvements in them. For example, helping students change a grade that they think is unfair, or helping students communicate with the different Department Chairs about trying to pursue their major by more than just taking classes. Like doing research, writing thesis papers with a professor they are unable to do alone. Also, I really think that the Registrar and Academic Advisement, those two offices need to improve. Students complain to me all the time that they have so much trouble registering for classes. They can’t get classes and the Academic Advisors that they see give poor advisement. They’re not helpful at all. I think that goes hand-in-hand with student rights. We have the right to Academic Advisement and the right to take the classes that we need and want, and the fact is some students aren’t able to. What we try to do, as Student Government, is to help those students. The College Council presented this list of grievances to Advisement. We’ve been meeting with different administrators and directors to tell them “we want to work with you,” and they said “we want to work with you too, how can we do this? How can we get better advisement? How can we get more class availability and help students schedule their classes?” A lot of it has to go through petitions, which we help push through. One thing that was pushed through by a Senator on Student Government, Ali Shah, was the Arabic language class. That was all him. He started a petition, he’s the Academic & Co-Curricular Affairs Commissioner, and he basically did it himself. He did have to work with getting it approved by the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee and the Modern Language Department to accept it, but it happened. It worked, and it was by one of our own senators. There’s a process to everything, and we just have to try to help the students make that process better.
TR: How would you fix the CSI and CUNY system as a whole?
JS: That’s the ten billion dollar question.
TR: Let’s say blank check. Everything you could do to fix CSI and CUNY, what would you do?
JS: This, I think, would fix the CUNY system as a whole. A lot of people aren’t going to like it, but CSI isn’t the only school in the system that has open admissions. This academic year we had so many people on the wait list because we had so many applicants. If you apply to Hunter or Baruch, you can’t get in if you have a low GPA or SAT scores. You have to meet a standard, and CSI doesn’t even have that standard. We have other community colleges that are like that, and I understand that the community colleges are there to help students who may not have had that GPA, but we’re not supposed to be a community college. We’re supposed to be a senior college. We should have some kind of standards, just so that we can compete academically. That should go across the board for all CUNYs. We do have some excellent programs from different schools. City College has the Colin Powell Center for International Studies, which is amazing. They provide grants to students, and they send students abroad. They have scholarships, internship opportunities, and I think that’s wonderful. I think every CUNY school, just like CSI, just like City College, every school can have their great academic emphasis. I don’t think we get rated high enough at all, and the reason for that, I think, is that we’re not Ivy League or private.
TR: People will pay a lot for college; not the degree but the name on the degree.
JS: Definitely, they’re pretty much paying for the brand name. Whereas here in CUNY, your education is what you make of it. I firmly believe in that. If you want to be an average student, you can. If you want to excel, you can, but it goes back to the student; they have to take the initiative to express that interest. They’re only hurting themselves if they don’t ask questions, if they don’t participate in class discussions, if they don’t talk to their professors outside of classes. So, in order to fix the CUNY system, to sum it up: It’s the responsibility of the students, faculty and administration. They don’t necessarily have to work together, but they all have to do their job. Students have to do their research, take the initiative to make their education what they really want it to be. The faculty really needs to take the initiative to engage their students. I’ve seen faculty who teach out of the textbook, and they could care less. That needs to change. The administration really needs to listen to their Student Governments. The Student Government feels the pulse of the student body, and can tell the Administration where they’re lacking. This is what we need to put money towards, this is how you can improve the school. If all three groups were doing their jobs, we would have a much better CUNY and a better College of Staten Island.
TR: Thank you very much. It was very enlightening.
JS: You’re welcome. I had a lot of fun.