I’m a master’s student, I’m only taking one class a semester at Loyola and I’ve got a full-time job.

That is, I shouldn’t really care about SGA or The Maroon. But I do.

Let’s take The Maroon, for example. The point of the newspaper is to keep the whole Loyola community informed about what’s going on. Because, the assumption goes, somewhere out there, there are concerned Loyola students. Indeed, if The Maroon’s survived for so long, it must be because a good deal of Loyola students care about it. It must – and does! – have a readership.

Any campus organization that strives to work for the benefit of Loyola students should make such assumptions, I believe. It should believe that Loyola students care about it. Its members should assume that Loyola students are intelligent and thus well worth working for.

SGA does not paint that picture.

A few weeks ago, we had representatives of SGA going beyond mere condescension when it came to Loyola students, the population they are supposedly called to serve. We had Michael Falotico believing that “most students don’t even read the constitution,” and that they would much less “care about the changes” made to it. We had Mara Steven saying that “most people probably don’t care” about the constitutional changes. So deep ran the cynicism in SGA that we even had Steven despairing about the idea of an election in general: “elections are usually a popularity contest,” she begrudgingly said.

Yes, true.

But elections are also the basis for democracy. And that – democracy – is kind of a big deal round these parts (look up “the founding fathers” on Wikipedia). And as far as I know, SGA is supposed to emulate it.

This move was bad on various counts. First, as politicians, they should know better. They should know that being condescending to your electorate is in bad taste, a stupid move (I advise them to go YouTube and look up “Mitt Romney 47%,” see how that worked out for him), and probably bad karma. It can dethrone people with presidential hopes, even. Karma is one tricky lady, I hear.

And of course, it’s much worse to despair about the fundamentals that make up the organization you run in the first place!

But most disappointing is the cynicism behind what these SGA representatives said. It’s very disappointing for me as a Loyola student to know that my representatives think so lowly of me and of their fellow students. As for other Loyola students out there, I urge them to think about the dangers that there are in letting people who think we’re apathetic creeps have so much authority over us, and giving some bit of our tuition money to allow them to play the roles they play, that they may continue to build a tower built on smugness, elitism and condescension.

Sincerely,

Rolando Lopez, Loyola alumnus