The MSU? What’s that?
By: Emily Current
What exactly is the MSU? To be honest, even though I’m a student here at McMaster, I don’t think that if someone were to ask me this question I could adequately answer it. Aside from knowing that the acronym stands for the McMaster Students Union, I have little knowledge of what the MSU is or what it does. And I don’t think that this is an uncommon sentiment among students.
The MSU Presidential elections just took place last month and there seemed to be a huge push towards getting as many students as possible to vote. And it turned out that 42.2 percent of students did vote — that’s the highest voter turnout in any MSU election.
So if so many students took the time to vote and to express their opinion about who should be the next leader of the MSU, doesn’t that mean that students are engaged with and care about the MSU and its actions? Not necessarily. When the MSU elections were still happening, I found myself talking about them with friends and classmates, and I realized that even though we were supposed to decide who the next MSU President is, we didn’t even know how much power the MSU President has.
When we were looking at the different candidates’ platforms, we often questioned whether, if elected, the candidate could actually do the things that they were promising they would do. This process of talking with other students about the upcoming MSU elections revealed two problems to me. First, that students lack knowledge of, and thus easy access to, the MSU. Secondly, that given this lack of knowledge, students can’t really make an informed decision when voting for the MSU President.
The name of the McMaster Students Union suggests that the MSU is made up of a group of students, who are supposedly intended to represent all other students. But how good of a job can the MSU really do at representing all students when there is an air of mystery and uncertainty surrounding it?
It is ironic that an organization which is supposed to represent students doesn’t actually feel accessible to those students. And it begs the question of whether the MSU can actually fully serve students, given that many students don’t completely understand what the MSU is or what it can actually do.
While it is possible for things with the MSU to remain the way they are, with students continuing to question what exactly the union is, we should really expect more. We should hope that something will change, so that more students will actually understand and be able to take part in the organization that is supposed to represent them within the university system.
