College is about learning (to do your job)

By Monique Merrill

There’s some excitement on campus: The Associated Students Board is holding a recall election regarding AS VP for Business and Operations, Genaro Meza-Roa, upon a unanimous recommendation for impeachment by the AS Student Senate and a majority vote in favor of impeachment from the board themselves.

The complaints cited by fellow AS employees include missing his office hours, missing job trainings, leaving a meeting to drink wine, refusing to use peoples’ pronouns correctly and generally not fulfilling job responsibilities.

Listen, we’re all busy. It’s college, afterall. And we would all prefer to drink wine over attending a meeting. Again, it’s college.

College is, in many ways, about making mistakes, learning from them and growing. Sometimes those mistakes are failing a final because you stayed up all night watching the seventh season of Gilmore Girls again, even though you know it’s the worst one but you just have to finish it so you can watch the revival in good conscience, and sometimes those mistakes are drinking instead of attending a meeting you are paid to be at.

Both of those situations waste tuition money. The difference is that the first wastes your own tuition money, and the second wastes ours.

Elected representatives have a responsibility to the campus community, and the bylaws of AS allow recall elections for this very reason.

Now, in the next couple weeks there will be an opportunity to fill the position again, either with a new student or Meza-Roa, who, to his credit, is not going down without a fight. Partially because, as he said in an interview with the AS Review, “to see a unanimous decision from a senate is, for me, a cause of great suspicion.”

Meza-Roa was invited to attend the Student Senate meeting, but was not able to attend. It’s possible that attending the meeting could have de-mystified some of that suspicion.

Again, college is a time in life when many make mistakes and learn from them. Countless young men learn to accept the fact that they cannot and should not try to grow a beard; students learn that trying to balance 18 credits, two nannying gigs and playing in a band is logistically and physically impossible; many come to understand that neither coffee nor Redbull are suitable replacements for water; and some people learn that they must show up to, and participate in, their job in order to keep it.

The Western Front Editorial Board is composed of Dante Koplowitz-Fleming, Monique Merrill and Laura Place.

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