Student Government Association President Kaiyi Xie gives his State of the Campus address.
Rather than tout his organization’s accomplishments, SGA President Kaiyi Xie turned his State of the Campus address into a wakeup call for members to stay true to their campaign promises and reach out more vigorously to the student body.
Xie introduced his speech last night as more of a “state of the organization” address than a state of the campus and posed one overarching question to Student Government Association members: Are they engaging themselves as visibly and as ardently with their constituencies as they had when they ran for their positions last semester?
In his speech last night, Xie said executives would soon take tangible steps toward transforming the organization into a more “galvanizing body.” He, along with Speaker of the Legislature Carson McDonald, will soon charge a committee to discuss internal reform in the organization.
“With little hard power, and in recent times, little funding, the organization needs to focus more on being a catalyst for students instead of waiting for them to join us in our plans for change,” Xie said.
Thus far, Xie said, the body has fallen short of its potential. After the organization went three weeks without proposing any bills, several members voiced frustration at the body’s slow start this semester.
“I think our constituents deserve more than promises and self-praise,” Xie said. “These are not sufficient to justify why people should trust our organization. We have taken missteps this year and have had challenging, but productive, growing pains, and I am happy to admit it. If we are being honest with ourselves, for too long, we have not fully met our obligations.”
SGA Speaker Pro Tempore Andrea Marcin said Kaiyi’s message could not be more timely.
“I think it was something legislators really needed to hear,” she said. “There’s a lot of passion and talent in the legislature and as a legislative leader I’m always thrilled to hear about it, but we’ve had some growing pains as Kaiyi said, and I think it’s something legislators really took to heart tonight.”
Additionally, Xie said the organization has often been viewed as closed off and inaccessible to students, a perception members can only change if they reach out to their constituencies with the same energy they had during their campaigns.
“If there is any standard of success that we may use to measure ourselves, let it be the visibility of our organization, the urgency we show in engaging students on issues that are more often than not time sensitive and the passion we exude in how we carry ourselves as representatives first, and legislators second,” Xie said. “If we don’t represent students first, our legislation and actions will be out of touch and void of credibility, much like the administrations that came before us.”
SGA members must create a unified front in order to accomplish its university-wide and state-wide goals, according to Xie. Next semester, the organization plans to lobby the state legislature in Annapolis and also plans to weigh in on key federal issues, such as Pell Grants and subsidizing loans for higher education. One university issue Xie said needs strong student input is the ongoing study of a possible merger between this university and the University of Maryland, Baltimore.
“This is an incredibly exciting prospect, and students should be an integral part of the discussion,” Xie said.
But that voice is only as strong as the members’ efforts to actively reach out and listen to the needs and opinions of the students they represent.
“We cannot expect them to come to us with their ideas, and for too long this organization has relied on the false premise that it is solely contingent on them to do so,” Xie said. “What appears as apathy could simply be the lack of an adequate forum to air their views, and it is our ultimate responsibility, over perhaps any other, to go to them instead of sitting in wait for them to come to us.”
Leonardtown legislator Robert DiMauro noted how different Xie’s speech was from his predecessor, Steve Glickman’s, state of the campus address last year, which focused chiefly on the organizations’ accomplishments and highlighted longterm goals.
“He wanted to speak a little bit more of the responsibilities of legislators, and I think he’s absolutely right,” he said. “The responsibility is on us to get out there and meet our constituents and address the concerns of the constituents and be a bit more involved with the students’ interests rather than highlight our successes.”
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