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The MCSG elections are Monday, but who would know it? As of press time there has been very little noticeable talk on campus about the elections, and Wednesday afternoon’s candidate forum was poorly attended. The entire student body will be electing its next student body present and executive board, yet there seems to be an overwhelming amount of apathy on the matter.This apathy seems to reflect a general attitude on campus that most students ignore MCSG on a regular basis. Many students are unable to point to any one thing MCSG has been working on this semester, besides perhaps the Panini maker, and during the past few semesters the class of 2010 has had a hard time filling all of its allotted slots for class representatives.

Most candidates running for MCSG positions in recent memory have made a call for transparency and to communicate better with students, but given the current situation it seems that there are steps that need to be taken at both ends to ensure these promises start actually becoming reality.

If students feel that MCSG isn’t doing enough on campus, then they should approach MCSG and tell them specific things they want to see happen. The Tuesday night MCSG meetings are open to all students, but rarely do any choose to attend.

If MCSG wants to have its presence felt more on campus, it should make sure important events such as elections are publicized strongly enough so that students take an active interest in them rather than letting them pass on by.

The majority of the student body interactions with MCSG are through student orgs over money issues, which are an important function of a student government, but students shouldn’t only feel interested in approaching MCSG when money is at stake. It seems election time would be an ideal time to break with the usual situation and pay attention to MCSG, but there are no signs this is happening during the heat of election time.

If you haven’t been following the election very closely, it’s not too late to get caught up to speed before Monday. All the candidates have submitted statements to The Mac Weekly (see page 5), so if you don’t even know who is running we’d recommend taking a look. Some of the candidates tell you to feel free to contact them, make sure to take them up on that if you have questions.

As we prepare to elect a fresh group of MCSG executives and representatives it is as good a time as any to have conversations about how we want MCSG to function on campus in the future, and we’d encourage students to take an active part in this conversation to keep the connections between MCSG and the student body as strong as possible.

The opinions expressed above are those of The Mac Weekly, as determined by the staff. The perspectives are not representative of Macalester College.