By Dave Dyck

Dear editor,
Re: “Forum a better choice for SFU politics”

Last week, former SFSS board member Kyle Acierno wrote a piece entitled “Forum a better choice for SFU politics.” In the article he bemoaned the current state of affairs within the SFSS executive board, specifically what he sees as a lack of accountability. This lack of accountability, as Acierno sees it, has led to the BuildSFU project as well as last year’s staff lockout being pushed through without enough student input.

Perhaps Acierno has been gone from SFU for long enough that he has forgotten his own support for the lockout, or the two hour Forum meetings where what type of chairs to purchase took up a significant portion of time. If it takes the members of Forum — most of whom sit on the council for one semester and then vanish — that long to come to a decision about chairs, how does Acierno expect them to deal with real problems like labour disputes and student union buildings?

If Acierno still believes that the lockout was necessary, as he has stated in this publication, I wonder how he would feel about taking that vote to a largely disorganized, uninformed body like Forum, and not only try to explain to them the different problems the university faces, but also seek useful input on the matters.

I understand that it is not a popular opinion, but anyone who has sat through a Forum meeting knows that this is the reality of the situation. Forum delegates are more often than not appointed from a small cadre of students in each department, arrive to the meetings with no knowledge of what is going on, and then proceed to vocalize that ignorance for what seems like forever. They are the ones who drown out or overpower any reasonable, rational, and experienced Forum members.

Acierno has the great boon of situational distance, where his recommendations will have no personal repercussions, and is no doubt chuckling away to himself with visions of longer and longer and more and more useless Forum meetings dancing in his head. And as funny as that would be, it’s not exactly practical, Kyle.

Sincerely,
Dave Dyck
Peak Associate