You know what yanks my Cord…

… the yearly pissing away of my money by WLUSU.

Wilfrid Laurier University Student Union (WLUSU) has a bad habit of spending money on things that aren’t needed, which was particularly evident last year and is shaping up to be the case again this year.

Perhaps some of that has to do with a lack of effort to get student input before these big spending projects are approved, but to me it comes down more to our elected representatives failing to exercise common sense.

It is a wonder how anyone supports these people, especially given that we are spending $600,000 this year to renovate the third floor of the Fred Nichols Campus Centre (FNCC), which had major renovations in 2009 and 2010.
This suggests that long term sensible planning is absent in the organization and speaks to the tendency of WLUSU to engage in compulsive buying. Take the $48,000 spent on last year’s LCD television screens for example.

The screens were mainly used to tell us the current weather outside and the hours of the Terrace and Wilf’s, not a sensible investment in any respect.

So often this spending is completely unnecessary. Having spent over $100,000 on a new website two years ago, with the intent of making WLUSU more relevant to students, WLUSU approved an additional $40,000 expenditure this summer in large part to add a social network component to the website. I’ve tried it out and frankly it sucks.

With much more successful and versatile options like Facebook available for free, there was no need to waste the money as, on the long term, it’s not a market WLUSU can win over. If nothing else, students don’t need the student union website to make friends and connect. That they can manage on their own.

Between the television screens, website upgrades and SkyDome inspired digital sign, it seems like WLUSU is more concerned about looking relevant to students than being relevant. It’s bad enough you take about $700 a school year from each of us, the least you could do is spend it wisely.
—Keith Marshall