Student-centricity

Student-centricity. It is a term that we have heard many times from administrators. Stevens values student-centricity and wants to increase it.

Yet, whenever something happens, students aren’t usually involved.

Imagine you are moving to a new apartment. Usually, you tell the movers what time to show up and what stuff they should be careful with, etc.

When student organizations moved out of Jacobus, they had a very different treatment. They were told when to show up, and after a long confusing day, the students were told the move would get pushed back a day due to a low quantity of movers.

Of course, this is a totally reasonable outcome. After all, who could have predicted the extremely low temperatures or that a club like WCPR had a lot of stuff to move, which would take up most of the day.

Well, the problem is that WCPR could have notified the people in charge that they had a large amount of boxes that needed to be moved. This is a small, yet perfect example of how despite boasting “student-centricity” there isn’t a lot that is done to show this.

A lot of student organizations were affected by the move out of Jacobus. Most organizations got moved to various storage spaces and there were some that transitioned to Howe. Yet none of these clubs participated in the discussion of the details of the move.

I understand that admins have different priorities, like making sure that Jacobus is empty and not how smoothly the move went. In that case, don’t boast “student-centricity.” I also understand that sometimes things that students want aren’t practical. However, it would be nice to have students included in the discussion about even something as minor as moving.

For example, The Stute had a deadline on Saturday night, which had to be pushed from the normal Thursday night layout. Yes, we ended up meeting our deadline, but there were a number of circumstances that came up (which I’m not going to get into) that could have hindered us due to the move. If students were involved, we could have voiced concerns such as “Stute has a deadline” or “WCPR has x amount of boxes which could take a lot of movers to transport.” I’m sure there are variables that were more important, but perhaps students could have helped solve problems and run things more smoothly. There is a reason why there is public outreach done by city and state governments whenever an infrastructure project will affect the residents.

If Stevens doesn’t include students in these small decisions, which in the grand scheme of things is understandable, I hope they at least take comments and turn them into lessons learned for the future.

Let’s talk about the new student center, for which construction will soon begin. This is supposed to be a space for students, but it sounds like a lot of administrative offices will be also located there. My only hope is that if this is meant to be a space for students, the committee involved in the planning takes the needs of the students into consideration as well. Hopefully they ask, What have students been missing that we could give them in this new building? Study spaces? Lounge spaces?

I don’t know what the student body would like, but neither do the admins. I think that if we all worked together, whether it was a survey or a town hall or certain members of the student body speaking to a committee, the new building could be great.

Student-centricity is a great thing, but it is time we actually started practicing it and worked together.