“God, ASG just doesn’t do anything!”

This favorite complaint of Northwestern students still rings familiar today, even after successive ASG presidential campaigns promised to restore relevance to the organization. Given the fact that ASG really does provide helpful services to students (really!), why does this belief continue to persist?

Well, let’s take a look at one of their biggest projects, NULink, and see if we can crack the case:

Most of the site works well enough, I’ll give you that, but the link titled “Academic Calendar” goes to a failed link directing users to the ’07-’08 academic calendar. This is just a foretaste for the feast to come.

Whether the connections are outdated or simply wrong, NULink boasts another five faulty links – “Trademark Licensing,” “University Health Services,” “Campus Maps,” “Digital City Chicago” and “NU Shuttles.”

Is this just nitpicking? I don’t think so: NULink is probably the single largest point of contact between ASG and the NU student body. With an online presence defined by an error-riddled Web site, it’s not all that surprising students might think ASG’s been lying down on the job.

(Not to mention the fact that “Academic Calendar,” “Campus Maps” and “NU Shuttles” are all wrong – don’t those seem like the links you really want to get right?) A Web site that purports to serve as a portal to other Web sites should have its links right. But, fine, they’re just links – these aren’t really ASG services in themselves. It doesn’t matter: Other ASG sites aren’t all that more impressive. Take a look:

The ASG blog has been updated once in the past five months. For all the promises of transparency I’ve heard from ASG, this strikes me as a rather opaque communication technique. (Amusingly enough, the one recent blog post tells students to go check out NULink. Scratch that.)

ASG’s newsletter, the ASG Connection (last updated in Feburary 2009, naturally), features a brief update and a calendar, while much of the page is devoted to a picture of the ASG Senate and – oh happy day – a picture and accompanying quote by Neal Sales-Griffin. Now, unless NSG is still poking around NU, this year-and-a-half-old newsletter doesn’t strike me as all that relevant.

A word to the, er, wise folks at ASG: The annoying “ASG doesn’t do anything” theme will persist as long as you advertise to the world a Web presence that suggests an organization not up to the task of advocating for the student body. But let’s be fair – just what is ASG up to?

I’d love to answer that, but the last time they posted any minutes was April 2009. If you’ve got a sense of hope and about eight months, I might be able to get back to you on that one.

Weinberg senior Mac LeBuhn can be reached at [email protected].