OUR OPINION

GRACE US WITH YOUR PRESENCE, ADVOCACY

Far be it from a group of students to tell the new vice chancellor for Student Affairs how to do his job.

Rather, let us say welcome to Gary Grace who was officially named to the post this week and will take over in early October.

Though some may not consider his appointment as significant as that of, say, the vice chancellor for Academic Affairs, the importance of Dr. Grace's arrival to students is not lost upon us.

Many administrators and students alike will look to Dr. Grace to begin a new era in Student Affairs at the University, not unlike the one Sandy MacLean initiated over 15 years ago when he took the job as dean of students.

As in those first days with Dr. MacLean, UM-St. Louis is again positioned to do great things in the coming years. A new University Center is slowly materializing from the cloud of intangible promises and plans of the past five years. The Office of Multicultural Relations is focusing the efforts of formerly independent programs into one dynamic support structure with the elasticity to meet a growing, equally diverse student population. And, Residential Life is slowly maturing from its embryonic stages into a recognizable community of students.

These and many other programs and projects are the stuff of great potential.

And to Dr. Grace goes the task of managing Student Affairs, whatever that term may come to mean.

For students in recent years, it has commonly meant being their advocate - advocating lower tuition when other bottom-line administrators are pushing to pass costs onto students; advocating higher student activity fees in order to provide adequately for student organizations and programs left underfunded by increased enrollment.

But for Dr. Grace, Student Affairs will likely come to mean something far different during his time here as the campus grows, changes and yet stays so much the same. In the end, it will largely be what he makes it.

WE WERE ALL HAVING FUN, UNTIL 'STOP TIME'

Every year, the University Program Board attempts to bolster involvement in student organizations by bringing everyone on campus together for events like EXPO, and without fail, the group shoots itself in the foot - every year - with "stop time."

Last Wednesday proved no exception. A crowd had gathered at EXPO in the Alumni Circle throughout the morning, and a sizeable number of people remained at 2 p.m. Yet, between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. the event was completely shut down. When evening students arrived, only a handful of people remained, and the great majority of booths never reopened.

Stop time has this same squelching effect on UPB's other premier event, Mirthday, held later in the year.

On a campus where everyone professes such concern about a lack of student participation, it seems strange that UPB, the group charged with increasing this participation, would plan an event and then tell everyone to go home.