Dear Editor:
I am writing to pose a question in regard to the story "Three students show at open forum on tuition." Is anyone really surprised? As a lifelong Carbondale resident and current John A. Logan College student, I have seen the apathy of the students grow year after year, while morale continues to plunge into the ground. The vicious cycle of administrative blunders has caused Southern Illinois University to gradually deteriorate into a fourth-tier school, which lowers morale and causes the administration to claim students don't care as they authorize more blunders.
Most of these kids do care about school issues, such as the current encroachment uproar, relations between the Carbondale Police Department and SIU students and the proposed tuition increase. But looking at the attendance to open forums on these issues, it must be much easier to complain about these issues while standing around a keg of beer than it is to actually get out and voice an opinion. What else is the administration to think?
If things are really going to get better, it's going to have to be a give and take relationship between the administration, the student body and the city of Carbondale. It's the only way to fix the current relations nightmare. School spirit has been lost. It has been replaced with bad memories of macings, police harassment on the Strip and an indifference that continues to grow. This doesn't have to be. When I went to visit the University of Kansas, where I will be attending this fall, I realized what SIU could be. There, buildings are no better than SIU's. Their campus, no more beautiful. But what they had is something Southern Illinois University has lost. And that, my friend, is Pride.
John Barrett
sophomore, international relations
John A. Logan College
Published on 11/17/05; 12:24:44 PM
