Next to Jon Barnhart’s office door is a whiteboard with the number of business days left in his term as Student Association president. Underneath the countdown is a list of goals he and the committees want to accomplish. At one point, the list had 30 goals.

‘Slowly but surely, almost all of them have been crossed off,’ said David Woody, SA’s Student Engagement Committee chair. 

When Barnhart campaigned for president of Student Association last November, he focused on the issues he thought were most important to students: safety, inclusion, financial responsibility and education.

Barnhart has been able to achieve some of those goals and has also made decisions on unexpected issues that came up during the year. Still, there are some goals he was not able to complete by the end of his term.

Barnhart said he takes pride in SA’s ability to adapt to unexpected issues that occurred during his presidency.

‘I think it’s really the sign of a strong student government to be able to mobilize and act quickly on the things it’s not expecting,’ said Barnhart.

In the spring, SA dealt with the merging of the advertising design and the communications design majors in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. The issue raised concern among students who felt the school did not communicate their intentions with those who would be affected by the change. SA worked to open communication between VPA and the students so that students were aware of the changes and why they were made.

In general, many student concerns stemmed from a lack of communication. Every time everyone was brought together to discuss an issue, someone would have different information, he said.

‘One of the biggest problems students saw was that they didn’t think they had adequate say when, in reality, they did,’ he said.

Safety

The first meeting Barnhart had as SA president was with the Department of Public Safety. Barnhart wanted to improve safety on campus by fixing and installing lights on and off campus, improving collaboration between DPS and Syracuse Police and creating a community watch program.

SA collaborated with National Grid, which unblocked and fixed 60 lights off campus during Barnhart’s campaign. Although some lights have been fixed, others have not been installed yet.

Barnhart said he met with DPS to discuss new safety programs and ways to promote them. Such programs include Shuttle 44, a texting system for emergencies, and a Student Safety Advisory Committee.

The Office of Off-Campus and Commuter Services began a program similar to a community watch as Barnhart was campaigning. As a result, Barnhart did not pursue the initiative.

Neal Casey, Student Life Committee chair and president-elect, said he believes more could have been done. Casey plans to continue working on safety during his presidency, Casey said.

‘I think that coming in, we wanted to do a lot more for campus safety,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think we got to accomplish that.’

Inclusion

When Barnhart began his presidency, he wanted to create a less segregated campus but did not have any specific ideas as to how to do this.

‘This isn’t something we were going to solve or something we were going to fix,’ Barnhart said. ‘This was something that we were going to start.’

During Barnhart’s term, Assemblymember Bonnie Kong began the Student Leadership Roundtable to give student leaders the opportunity to speak with the chancellor and ask questions. A common theme was student concern about segregation on campus, Barnhart said.

Syracuse University is ranked the 20th most segregated school by the Princeton Review. During this semester, a student brought up the Princeton Review’s survey and how it influences students to think about segregation at SU, Barnhart said. Students are given the option of filling out a 50-question survey, but of those questions only two are used to decide which schools are the most and least segregated, he said.

Once SA received this information, it did not have time to act on it but began to brainstorm what it could do, Barnhart said.

The Non-Traditional Student Commission, created by Angelo Coker, SA vice president, was formed last semester and directed to groups, including commuter students, part-time students and transfer students. Although it was successful last semester, the commission did not have as much direction this semester, as there was a transition in leadership for the commission, Barnhart said.

Despite the commission’s reduced involvement from last year, Barnhart and Casey have been drafting a bill to include a nontraditional student seat in SA. Barnhart said he wishes he could have made this official before the end of his presidency.

Financial responsibility

With tuition on the rise, one of Barnhart’s goals was to put in place a lock-in tuition. But this was more complicated than anticipated because the university relies heavily on tuition revenue to improve, Barnhart said.

Instead, SA decided to focus on what it could control — the student activity fee.

SA made University Union the Official Programming Board, which Barnhart considers one of his biggest accomplishments. SA has been attempting to make this happen for years, he said.

‘All of us had seen other administrations fail,’ he said. ‘When we started working on this, we said we were going to get this done.’

The second accomplishment Barnhart is most proud of is the new student advancement fund, which will help SA fund necessary student services. The fund sets aside a small portion of the student activity fee to fund necessary SA expenses.

At the beginning of the year, the Student Engagement Committee attempted to run a bus from campus to Wegmans and Target. The program funding was to be split between SA and the two companies, but during its final step, one of the two companies chose not to help fund the program, Barnhart said. The student advancement fund would help prevent similar situations from occurring.

Education

In an effort to inform students about SA and issues on campus, SA increased its use of media outlets, such as Facebook, Twitter, campus-wide e-mails and press releases, in comparison to past years. It also has its own show called ‘SA Today’ on CitrusTV.

But Sima Taslakian, former SA parliamentarian, said SA is falling short in improving its image.

Taslakian resigned from her position as parliamentarian due to a death in the family and personal issues unrelated to SA. But the students’ lack of knowledge about SA also influenced her decision to resign, she said.

But others, such as Woody, the Student Engagement Committee chair, said Barnhart has shown his ability to focus on student concerns. Barnhart has improved the organization through the creation of new codes, such as the student advancement fund. He has also made the organization more efficient, Woody said.

‘Anything he didn’t finish, he left a template for SA to follow in the future,’ he said.

Although some of Barnhart’s original plans did not come through by the end of his presidency, he was able to make improvements regarding all the goals he originally set with the students in mind, said Coker, Barnhart’s vice president.

‘He didn’t get caught up in the bureaucracy of working up with the administration,’ Coker said. ‘He never forgot for a minute that he was a student first.’

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Published on December 5, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Laurence: [email protected] | @lgleveille