Here at Skyline there are plenty of students with plenty of complaints about the various problems on campus. There are few places students can go to voice their concerns. We at The Skyline View, as a First Amendment protected newspaper, must provide an open forum for campus communication. However, we cannot do it alone. What we need is a regular forum for discussion held somewhere on campus; a well-organized event with an intelligent powwow between students, faculty, and whoever feels the need to engage. We can finally make things better at Skyline, but we need to do it together.
Recently, there have been a series of events here on campus that touched on some very important issues. The film “Crash” was shown on Jan. 25 followed quickly by a discussion forum on Feb. 1, which addressed the racial issues present on the big screen and right here on campus. The forum was called Speak Out, and it was a step in the right direction. Organized by students and faculty, Speak Out was a blueprint for what Skyline needs: conversation.
We live in an age where information travels at incredible speeds. The internet has become the new place for young men and women to meet and converse, and websites like MySpace, Livejournal, and RateMyProfessors.com are designed to make it easy for people to do just that. Students at Skyline often turn to these websites to express themselves in cyberspace.
Those websites are not exclusively made for students to complain about their lives at school. But when you are a student, school becomes a huge part of your life. We can see this on glowing monitors all over Skyline. Next time you’re in the cafeteria, see if you can spot the MySpace logo on any of the public computers; you’re bound to see it eventually. Forty percent of students polled on theskylineview.com say that MySpace should be banned from campus, as it has been in many schools countrywide, while another 40 percent say that MySpace usage should be limited, but not banned. To us at The Skyline View, this is a sure sign that a change is in the air… a change toward students being more involved in what happens at Skyline.
Websites have also been created specifically to publish opinions about school-related topics, as in the case of the Rate My Professors or Rate My Student websites. Exploring these sites reveals what they truly are: garbage. While constructive criticism is sometimes offered towards certain professors, there is also a huge potential for hurtful, negative commentary.
Many of these websites are being banned on campus for their negative content, but where are we expected to turn? Without a real meeting place on campus, without anywhere on the web to voice our opinions, the voice of Skyline College is being extinguished. The student body needs to rise up and gather, because nobody is going to do it for us.