Exponent shouldn't criticize apathy

To the editorial board of the Exponent,

There have been many editorials in the Exponent about getting involved; the attacks on apathy met little resistance. Maybe we should aspire to a world where all students gather to vote on issues, but for the most part we don’t care. If you're an average student, probably 80 percent of what the PSG does has little effect on your day-to-day life. Many people vote for president (based on one or two issues or a coin toss) because it's easy to vote. If Purdue would put important issues for vote on SSINFO (not in survey form), more people would respond. PSG could handle smaller issues that don't affect most of the students. This won’t happen though because the "uneducated" masses (those of us happy with Bs and sometimes even Cs) would easily kill ideas like a plus/minus scale (last year's issue) or Monday night exams.

How does our opinion matter when weighed against alumni, faculty and money that our president hopes to bring in? An example: I’m one of the many workers of the residence hall foodservice who got screwed this year when the merit raises were cut without notice. We had to work a certain amount of meals during finals week to receive the raise (5 to 15 cents an hour), afterwards we find out there would be no raise (after we had worked the meals, of course). Could we have done anything to fight this, was there a vote? No, the decision was passed down from the top.

Most of us can do little to affect change; those who can will most likely only be making those changes for future students, not current ones. So get involved if you want to and stop telling the rest of us to do so.

Robert Ranney

Junior, School of Liberal Arts

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