New VP for student affairs should listen to students

Throughout the summer, candidates for the position of Vice President for Student Affairs have been holding open forums to convince the UH student body, faculty and staff of their worthiness of the position.

This poses the question: What makes a candidate worthy of that title? Or rather, what do we as students, want and need from our new vice president for student affairs?

The student affairs office controls virtually everything that students come into contact with, so we need someone who knows what our concerns are and will implement policy accordingly.

With UH trying to become less of a commuter campus, the future VP should find ways to make living on campus more affordable and desirable. He or she should work along with students to make this happen.

The new VP should ensure that the health center, counseling and psychological services will be maintained and continue to be able to help students.

We need the new VP to make our campus recreation something students want to be a part of. He or she needs to have Cougar pride. They should make sure UH continues to get adequate funding to minimize increases in tuition prices.

This person should be doing everything in his or her power to make students’ experiences at UH easier, more enjoyable and less stressful.

The future VP should also understand that UH is diverse. Our campus has students from different races, nationalities and backgrounds. This position can’t be held by someone who doesn’t have experience working in this type of environment. We take pride in our diversity and so should our new VP.

Above all, the VP for student affairs should be someone who will listen to us — someone who cares about what we think is important for our school. We need someone to run student affairs how we feel it should be run. The new VP should put our needs and desires above their own, and be willing to listen to what the student body finds important.