No Comment

A Letter From the News Desk

NewsCorey Pool — Published September 11, 2012

Last week, The Link learned that, despite being elected by his council at a CSU meeting in June to represent undergraduate students on the university’s Board of Governors, Laforest’s name was missing from the BoG list.

The Board is the highest governing body at the university, and student representation there was already cut from four voting members to one last year. In a situation where Laforest should be trying to do the job of three students, he is doing the job of none.

Yet after repeated attempts to contact him, and repeatedly being ignored, misled or otherwise deflected, Laforest has ultimately shirked his responsibility as CSU president and chosen not to comment.

One week later, there is still no word from Laforest.

The fact is, he is not doing his job, and this is extremely disconcerting.

This, folks, is your student leader. This is your president. You elected him to lead your union, to represent you, and to answer to you. You pay his executive salary, and you are technically all his bosses.

Though this is just university politics, it is not a game. This is serious, the stakes are high, and running a student union like a high school experiment is inappropriate and irresponsible.

Laforest’s status at the university—that is, whether he is technically a student or not—has been called into question on more than one occasion, and these recent developments are not working in his favour.

But by keeping mum about the questions that surround him, and by ignoring The Link’s repeated attempts at conversation, Laforest is by extension ignoring the students.

To be fair, his mostly vacant executive has not done much better.

VP Student Life Alexis Suzuki has ignored and avoided tough questions by our editors concerning the missing Orientation concert headlining act and the missing student agendas, claiming to be too busy. VP Advocacy Lucia Gallardo has done the same, screening phone calls and not responding to important emails.

At a time when students need them the most, a handful of their elected VPs have proven themselves to be nothing more than hollow representations of the promises they made while campaigning in the spring.

In many ways, The Link is a liaison between the rest of the university and its students. We do our best to hold these people accountable to the student body and to report what is important to the community.

However, when the CSU reps put up walls, lock their doors, refuse to answer their phones and stop doing their jobs, we cannot do ours.