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Pounding hammers and raging drills aside, this year’s gutting of the Johnson Student Center has displaced many departments and student services, including the Office of Student Life, the Office of Community Engagement and the ASOC Senate Offices. But no office is as more important of a day-to-day resource than the oft-forgotten Student Activities Center (SAC). The SAC boasted marked-down amusement park tickets, movie rentals and the essentials for clubs wanting to quad-sit for their cause. It is an unfortunate reality that the SAC is no longer the convenient stop it used to be, but that should not stop students from taking full advantage of it.
It is almost halfway through the first semester, and the impact of the SAC’s relocation is already noticeable. Although the Academic Quad never came close to a Times Square atmosphere, many organizations and individuals took advantage of the SAC’s accessible location by quickly renting a table and chairs to promote various events and messages in one of Occidental’s most prominent public forums. Now, the quad is a proverbial ghost-town, partly because clubs are reluctant to drag materials all the way from the SAC’s new South Trailer location.
Take for example the SAC’s Oct. 1 announcement that camping rentals (sleeping bags and tents) would be discontinued indefinitely. Even though it was not explicitly mentioned in the statement, one must assume that this change in offerings comes as a direct response to a diminished interest in the SAC’s services due to a number of different factors. The SAC’s move this year certainly did not help an overall decrease in demand and awareness of what the SAC has to offer.
Lately posters have gone up around campus advertising the SAC’s move and more importantly their services to the general student body, but it has squandered the opportunity to use social media sites for promotional purposes, as the link to the SAC web page remains broken and unavailable on the college’s official website.
The ball does, however, remain in the student’s court. The college is by no means obligated to provide these discounts and services to the student body, and if they are not utilized, the SAC will likely end up living out of the very tents they stopped renting.
This editorial represents the collective opinion of the Occidental Weekly Editorial Board. Each week, the editorial board will publish its viewpoint on a matter relevant to the Occidental Community.
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