If a Student Council meeting happens, and no one is in attendance, does anything get done? The harder question: If the person who takes attendance doesn't show - well, where do we go from here?
Student government elections are accompanied by paradoxes of apathy. To gauge why students are uninvolved, organizations send out surveys which remain unfilled by the disinterested for whom such projects are intended. The opposite also holds, as students are told to vote and elect candidates who, in turn, do not show up for them. Nowhere are these paradoxes more acutely felt than with Council, whose strengths come from polling, while struggling with attendance.
We gathered attendance rates among the Council's representative body for the past term, and published them on page A2 of today's paper. Like any failed exam or medical positive, the results are distressing but also offer confirmation of what had been suspected. After most of the candidates seeking election to the representative body acknowledged Council's attendance problem while interviewing with us, the numbers substantiated their concerns. The overall attendance rate for undergraduate representatives