If the Missouri Students Association is to keep doing its job representing the student body, the Academic Affairs Committee needs to fulfill its liaison requirements, which it is presently not doing.

Chapter 2.64 section C of the MSA bylaws dictates the Academic Affairs committee must appoint at least seven members of the committee to act as liaisons with six different areas of the university including the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Studies, Faculty Council, the Committee on Undergraduate Education and academic student councils. The problem is, the committee only has 6 members. As of right now, an MSA committee is not following MSA’s own rules.

Presently, Academic Affairs Chairman Ben Levin has done well meeting with a few of the aforementioned groups, like Faculty Council, but hasn’t met much with individual student academic councils, meaning student representation is cut short. Levin also seems to be doing all of the work when there are five other committee members.

MSA could rewrite the bylaws so they would be fulfilling their own requirements, but that would be the easy way out.

It would be more effective for MSA to increase recruitment to make up for the shortage of committee members or implement strategies to make sure the committees are doing their jobs with the members they have.

A large portion of the work Levin is currently handling should be delegated to the other five members of the committee, even if duties have to be rotated. Every member should be doing something.

It can be argued that the bylaws give leniency in terms of how many meetings committee members are required to attend, and that attending meetings isn’t very important if those meetings don’t always have a specific agenda. If Academic Affairs doesn’t maintain open communication with the groups it has to work with, however, it will not know what is going on, and will be an ineffective organization.

If Academic Affairs and other committees aren’t fulfilling their purpose of communicating with other organizations, then they are doing nothing. MSA has significantly improved its retention in recent months, and fulfilling the duties of Academic Affairs by recruiting more members or by better delegating tasks would be one further step in increasing MSA’s effectiveness.