Getting to Know the USG: First Annual Report

The USG published its first annual report Monday, giving us an inside look at what exactly our student government does with $166,172.50 each year.  Many of the initiatives described were projects we already know and love – Lawnparties & Houseparties festivities, Garden Theater movies, and the like. But even more interesting was the chance to see the things the USG does that we don’t usually hear about – works in progress, on hold, or shut down – and their own assessment of how they’re doing.Yaro kicked it off with an interpretation of the USG’s mission: “make students happy.” If that’s the goal, then their emphasis, at least as evidenced by where they put their dollars, makes sense. During the fall semester, 46.6% of the total budget went to social projects – Lawnparties and the UFO (just like you learned in ECO 100, there’s no such thing as a free lunch: Garden Theater movies might be free for you, but Princeton’s picking up the $17,500 tab). Add in Projects Board funding, and it jumps to 67.7%.Still, it’s a pretty heavy focus on fun for an organization whose constitution begins with the following noble mission statement:The Undergraduate Student Government is dedicated to the proposition that students must be included in the making of decisions that affect them. We hark back to the words of Woodrow Wilson: We shall fight for the things which we have carried nearest to our hearts...for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments.It seems like the USG might agree.“Most notably, we were weakest in the area that matters the most: academics,” Yaro notes in the opening. “The areas in which we can and did achieve the most are the areas where the benefit to students is the least impactful.”But that’s also what makes the rest of the report interesting – for the first time, we can see that they are, in fact, working on the issues that may be tougher, but that might also have a bigger impact on student life at Princeton.For example, the USG is looking into making course materials available online, an increasingly common practice at other schools (think MIT’s OpenCourseWare).  That would include course notes and lecture videos that would help students prep better during exams period, make up missed lectures and shop classes without actually having to attend two weeks of classes for courses they might not take. Though it’s on hold for now due to the cost of taping all lectures and difficulty initiating the project with Dean Malkiel leaving, it’s still on the table for next year.Likewise for academic calendar reform. Efforts to eliminate classes the day before Thanksgiving and shift exam period to December were put on hold during the dean transition, but will be picked up again next year.Other highlights for projects in the works: grading policy research, moving meal exchange to students’ proxes and integrating course reviews.If nothing else, it shows that the USG is paying attention to what students want. But it’s also worth asking why it’s so hard for them to make progress in the areas students really care about. Sure, we’d expect challenges if the issue at stake was grade deflation, but should it really be so difficult to get OIT’s approval to move a printer from one of Frist’s upper floors to the main level?And for any diehard two-ply fans wondering what happened to our intense but short-lived toilet paper obsession, although it looks like a switch was seriously considered, you probably won’t get your wish. The USG found that Princeton might actually save money on a switch to two-ply if students would consume less of it, but given the sensitive economic times decided to finally put the discussion to as close as it was “unlikely this request would be taken seriously."Check out the full report for details here.