Last week I expressed my excitement for this campus’ commitment to condemning those who do things that are unacceptable, such as utilizing homophobic slurs in widely circulated publications. I was concerned with the lack of campus dialogue, and was especially excited that The Maneater was planning a forum to connect with its readership and the campus in general.
After thinking about the issue some more and listening to input from others, I feel as if I’ve stumbled upon a huge campus problem: disconnect.
Mizzou is an incredible university that offers students the ability to be who they want, start interest groups and create support systems. There’s amazing programming, speakers and events that are held (courtesy of tasty student fees) and we have some pretty cool traditions with the historic value that these grounds have soaked up. The caveat to the myriad of opportunity and wonder is MU’s variety: There’s too much shit going on at once with too many people, places, orgs and things for anyone to keep track of it all, let alone navigate it with perfect accuracy.
Because of this network of overlapping services, we get things like the Paint the M tradition being held on the same day as one of Academic Retention Service’s mandatory events for ARS scholarship recipients. You have to choose between Caring for Columbia and doing service for the community or seeing inspirational talks by leading thinkers at TEDxMU.
This just highlights the problem of “what-event-do-I-go-to-there’s-too-much-I’m-overwhelmed-let’s-go-home.”
Disconnect within MU, however, extends further than overlapping events on a calendar. I feel ungrateful to complain about the sheer number of resources MU has, but the amount of offices, departments, centers and other entities that aim to handle each and every aspect of student life and education creates a total clusterfuck of separated bubbles, most of which are focused on their own missions, inadvertently stepping on each other’s toes.
While I want to cite Weberian bureaucracy as the root of all evil and blame the sheer act of organization as somehow being self-defeating, doing so is unproductive. So how do we otherwise reconcile the enormous scale of MU? I have a few suggestions.
First off, begin with the event planning. It has always been my dream to see the Department of Student Activities, which sits under the executive branch of the Missouri Students Association, become its own separate entity. Within that body would be committees for different types of activities, absorbing some present groups (sorry, Student Union Programming Board) and recasting them as focused committees. The consolidated DSA would be concentrated _solely_ on creating high-quality activities with a focus on minimizing event conflicts. Smells like a plan.
Now, though I have dreams of a unified campus activities body to prevent over-programming that may never happen, I can always hope that on an individual level, if students, especially student leaders, interact with those outside of their own spheres of influence, we can diminish the chasms between each unit of MU.
(This is the part where I interrupt your regularly scheduled column, break all train of thought, and send out my own personal plug.)
In a previous [column](https://www.themaneater.com/stories/2012/2/3/bias-reporting-blues/) I waxed about how I wish the [Bias Report](biasreport.missouri.edu) contributed to a larger body of research to help the university make informed decisions. Well, right now there is a Campus Climate Survey going on that will ideally help fill that void and paint a picture of the current safety level at MU. Take it. Take it right now. _Everyone_ got a link to the survey in an email from Dr. Roger Worthington. With this information, the administration can have real data, a response, anything at all to work with to prove the need for creating a more cohesive campus. Thank you.