A town hall style meeting was held last night for the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and the Bauer School of Business.
The meeting’s general purpose was to address student issues in regards to both schools and to talk about success after graduation. The tone of the meeting was encouraging and motivational.
‘I think that’s the useful message of the whole night – don’t be so timid! This is your university, make it work for you!’ said Joseph Pratt, interim dean of the College of Liberal arts and Social Sciences
Along with Dean Pratt, other administrators were eager to send motivational messages to energize and gear the Cougar body to prod the administration into working for change towards a better university.
‘Students get a lot better response out of administrators than I can get out of Joe, and that he can get out of me,’ Vice President for Administration and Finance Carl Carlucci said.
‘We do respond to students as best as we can, if there’s anything we can do right away, we try to do it right away and I think those senators who have sat in my office and talked about things, I hope have seen that to be the case,’ He said.
Carlucci expounded on Dean Pratt’s message of putting the responsibly back on the students.
It is our duty to help solve campus problems and suggest ways to improve our campus by voicing our ideas and perspective.
Gene Locke, 2009 mayoral candidate and UH alumni, reached out to the crowd at the meeting. He shared his incredible story of how UH has transformed for the better, and how we need to keep fighting to make UH a better place.
Locke, a graduate of the Cougar class of ’69, said he became an activist the moment he decided to attend the University of Houston. As a political science major, Locke started transforming UH from the bottom up, starting with student politics as his vehicle.
One of his proudest achievements was getting the first African American Studies program on our campus.
When asked by the University of Houston Magazine why he became so immensely involved in UH, he responded, ‘There was a presumption that African-American students were incompetent. I had a very personal reaction to the low expectations that people had of me. It was a blow to my pride that people thought I couldn’t do the very things that I knew I could do.
‘Eventually that led me to look around campus and see that the only people who looked like me were not in positions of power, responsibility, or authority. My only encounters with people of color at the university were with the custodial staff. For me, it became a sense of obligation.’
Locke continued his desire to transform UH last night at the meeting by asking students to continue the same fight he did.
‘The biggest thing we had to do was a fight that I hope you and generations coming into this institution will always take up and fight for; make the university a part of this community,’ he said.
‘ The mayoral candidate, along with fellow Cougars, the deans and administrators, could not have been more right. Changing UH and making it the place we want it to be, a place desired and envied by many, starts with us.
