Actually, the title is a bit premature, according to MUSG’s new Web site which states, “Coming soon… Communications!” Regardless, MUSG launched a new Web site not long ago, and this is a big deal for them. For months at the Thursday night senate meetings, Communications Vice President Jillian Mertz has been touting this new Web site in front of all the senators. Honestly some people were beginning to wonder whether or not it was ever going to show up. However, once again, MUSG did not let anyone down, as the slogan on the Web site says, “Taking Action. Getting Results.”

Now the Web site itself is quite cool. It has neat graphics, and stuff works well, like any well oiled website should, it is technologically advanced, and the people that designed it deserve a fair amount of praise.

The content of the website is a bit disappointing though, as basically it is the same thing as the previous website, you have the budget, list of contacts, a few forms, the rules that they like to enforce on one another. Most of it is boring stuff that probably few care about at Marquette. So why would someone visit this new website? Blogs! Blogs have been an increasingly popular source of news. Around campus there are several professors who have them, many students, the news sources at Marquette are working on having blogs.

Everyone now wants a blog. It is a great source of news and information, only takes a few minutes to put up an interesting piece of news, and the world can instantly see it.

On the new MUSG website, many of the “top people” in MUSG have blogs. The shocking part is that only a few months ago, these same people refused to talk to anyone who had a blog, whether they were independent, student, professor, or worked for one of Marquette’s news media sources. President Brock Banks is particularly noteworthy, as he refused to talk to anyone who was remotely connected to a blog about anything. Now he has his own. Is this just an example of the hypocritical nature that MUSG dolls out every day? Did President Brock Banks realize he was wrong to shun blogs so quickly and adamantly? Or was this simply something that the new website included, so he had to go along with it?

Well, when contacting MUSG, specifically Communications Vice President Jillian Mertz to get a comment about the new website, and their communication policies, no response was received. Clearly, MUSG wants these blogs. Since they cannot control the media (unfortunately) it seems that they need to produce their own. Regardless of the nature in which these blogs were instituted, one can hopefully look forward to better communication from MUSG in the future, if not from these blogs, if not from this administration, then hopefully the next.

MUSG has some other forms of communication as well. Apparently somewhere in the AMU there is a comment or suggestion box. No doubt though finding that, is as challenging as finding the Fr. Wilde poster that they were hiding around campus before the Fr. Wilde Forum which occurred yesterday.

There is usually a reporter or two at the senate meetings to report a few things that are going on. MUSG send out weekly news letters via email to those people who have subscribed to them, which include nothing of significance. For example, for a couple of weeks, they included “Did You Know…that you pay a student activity fee of $27.00 each semester.” The answer of which is no, a lot of people do not know this, but they might want to keep it a secret or it might get out that this fee is unnecessary.

In essence, MUSG has no way in which it communicates to its constituency, the student body. Their new Web site is unlikely to change that.

Those within MUSG, specifically Giuseppe Pappalardo and Billy Doerrer, are recoginizing the disconnect between MUSG and the student body. They are addressing that in their campaign for MUSG President and Vice President. These people are insiders, and they acknowledge that MUSG does not communicate. That is how students should know that there is indeed a real problem with MUSG’s communication.

One can only hope that in the future, student government will be student friendly.

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