Co-curricular plan is a waste

The creation of co-curricular transcripts is the perfect campaign platform for an Associated Student Government candidate. Last year current ASG presidential (only) candidate Jay Schumacher named the addition of co-curricular transcripts one of the changes he wanted to accomplish as executive vice president this year. He apparently never got around to it, because executive and academic vice resident candidates are again proposing this worthless idea.

It’s understandable why the co-curricular transcripts program is a perennial favorite: Other schools have implemented it, the administration could accept it and students are happy to officialize their role as secretary of “Raising awareness of X, Y or Z” club. Like Bush’s proposed and abandoned mission to Mars, co-curricular transcripts sound like a cool idea. But like the hypothetical mission to Mars, there are more important things that we can spend our time and money on.

Few graduate programs or jobs that undergraduates apply for request an official co-curricular transcript. Students applying for the jobs that ask for verified extracurricular activities, usually higher-level management positions, have the responsibility to get these verified themselves, as they are doing now. Everyone else can just write a resume. Though other schools from University of Scranton to University of Tampa have signed on the co-curricular transcript trend, this isn’t a good enough reason for to sign on.

While fabricating involvement in extracuricculars is obviously a concern, even with an official transcript, students who want to lie may be able to find a way to beat the system. Resume padding is not enough of a reason to spend the time and money necessary to create the date entry system and infrastructure that it would require, nor the time or effort of ASG to lobby for this.

Break-ins must be made public

It took the administration more than a week to notify students that an Evanston man was arrested for allegedly trying to enter Willard and Chapin Residential Colleges during Spring Break.

The April 4 campus-wide e-mail from Dean of Students Mary Desler was the first official notification given by the administration, but rumors of an attempted break-in circulated for days. Desler even acknowledged that she was not the first to give this news, with the opening line of the e-mail with “As you may already know-“

The delay was not explained or even mentioned. Instead, the rest of the e-mail was filled with useful information such as “Students should never admit anyone whom they do not know well,” and “If you believe the situation is an emergency, diall 911.”

Student safety may be “one of the University’s top priorities,” but if this is true it shouldn’t take more than a week to notify students that somebody may have been trying to break into where they live, even if it was over Spring Break. Just because students are not on campus doesn’t mean that they don’t check their e-mail or care that someone tried to rob their building.

If there was a good reason for the delay, it should have been included in the e-mail. As it is, students did not know what happened and were forced to rely on gossip and rumors for information.

Knowing about security concerns can make a person behave differently, and in this case much more cautiously. Knowing that an intruder may have tried not just to sneak past a bored security monitor (which anybody can do) but break into their dorm is something that students need to know about as soon as possible – not at the administration’s convenience.