A year later, SGA Key sits untouched

By: JOSH WEISS

Posted: 6/21/07

When I came for Orientation during summer 2004, I was told of a glorious tool that was provided to students.

The Key, as it is known, is a database of all the courses offered at the University.

While not the end-all-be-all evaluation tool, it certainly pointed you in the right direction.

The Key, as it was, provided important information to students and increased the accountability of professors to students.

If an instructor had failed over 50 percent of his students, it made you wonder if it was student inability to learn or the professor's inability to teach, especially if it was a pool of 600 students.

However, for all intensive purposes, The Key is dead.

After Associate Provost for Institutional Effectiveness Bob Boehmer crippled the online database of grade distributions in spring 2006 by removing professors' names, there was an outcry by students to return The Key to its former self.

The Student Government Association, under then-President Jamie Peper, claimed to have struck a deal with the administration in which The Key would be returned, but under the control of SGA.

Several months later, The Key did pop up on the SGA web site, but has sat dormant now for the past year without updates.

This neglect has rendered The Key outdated and increasingly useless, since new professors are not listed and old professors' data has not been updated.

I'm curious as to why not, considering SGA touted "saving The Key" as a highlight of its accomplishments, and that they pay a student several hundred dollars per year to maintain and update the SGA Web site.

During my three years at the University, with the exception of anything football-related, no issue rallied students to the degree that the possible abolishment of The Key did. Facebook groups were formed, protests at Tate were threatened and e-mail boxes were stuffed with complaints.

After some closed-door meetings, The Key appeared to be saved and the students and the administration both claimed victory.

The administration no longer had to run The Key and was able to tout its ideals of academic rigor, and SGA had finally accomplished something meaningful.

Or so we thought.

Because of SGA's inability to keep this useful tool up to date, the administration got what it wanted all along, and students were left wondering what had actually happened.

Maybe it's just a conspiracy theory, or maybe that's why the administration consented to handing control over to SGA to begin with.

Should we expect anything less, though?

If I've said it once, I've probably said it a million times in my columns.

When it comes to delivering what students want, SGA is incapable of providing it.

- Josh D. Weiss is the photography editor of the Red & Black. He has formed an exploratory committee for a potential SGA
presidential run. He can be reached at jweiss@randb.com.