So this is our time?

With the first round of exams and papers due soon, this time of the year reminds me of when I first started university — rushing to get to class on time, finally buying my textbooks, and forcing myself out of bed the second my alarm rings
But over the past few years, my enthusiasm for school has dwindled. All that excitement has been replaced by frustration at the York community. The administration can be difficult, but even more disheartening is the apathetic student body.
York is currently facing a deficit of $12.8 million. As such, a budget plan has been implemented to climb up out of this hole. The budget will cut funding university- wide, four per cent for the next three years followed by another 2.5 per cent after that. Don’t think that the budget is a problem just for the administration. Budget cuts mean that York will have to cut corners and reduce services around campus.
At the same time, York is over- packing classrooms, overpricing textbooks, and charging more for tuition. We are looking at a four per cent increase in tuition over the next few years. This seems insignificant, but for many of us who rely on student loans and may be in school for a couple more years, that adds up to a lot of money.

Essentially, we are going to be paying a lot more for school, but getting a lot less out of it. 

No wonder I’m no longer optimistic. Shelling out upwards of $6,000 a year is hard enough already. All this for a liberal arts degree, which does not guarantee great employment opportunities after graduating.
Let’s not kid ourselves. A university is a business before it is an institution of learning. My apologies to our idealistic first years. That said, all hope is not lost. We can still have the fun, engaging university experience that was promised to us in our youth. Half of York’s operating budget comes from student tuition, which means that we as a student body should have some influence and power over our own experience. But in my three years here, I’ve come to realize that many students just don’t care. Almost everyone complains, but nobody fights for their student rights.

The safety rally around the concern of sexual assaults last year was a start, but it seems the student body could not pull together enough as a community to create the lasting social effect that everyone was looking for. Had we been able to sustain that virility, we may have seen more change in the safety issues on campus.
Protests have disappeared from campus, protests that used to be a sign of a resilient student body determined to receive the education they are paying for in an environment that facilitated their success. This is partially the fault of the administration who notoriously closed the front doors of Vari Hall to deter these protests. But students have also stopped trying, and instead have become docile.

I myself am guilty of slowly slipping into this silent herd. The York of today is not the York of old, and I believe we are due for some retroaction.

We don’t need Vari Hall to let our voices be heard. We were able to band together last year around safety issues and the university took notice. We can do that again and keep the momentum to see to it that our student concerns are met. We have the power to take control of our university experience and build it into one that will make us happy to go to school, one we can be proud of.
Any university is a sum of the people who make it up, including the administration, faculty, and staff. But at the core of the university are the students it serves.

We as a student body are among the largest in the country, and we should not be content to sit back and take the brunt of administrative changes.
As York itself keeps telling us, this is our time.
Hamid Adem
News Editor