Thursday morning, Northern Iowa Student Government’s Upper Cabinet offered a listening ear for students while also providing a tasty treat in between classes. They set up a table outside of Maucker Union for their annual “complain for a cookie” event.
Students came up to the table with complaints on everything from dorm accommodations to the practices of specific professors.
“The whole point of this has been to get areas that we can improve on campus, and there have been a lot of very interesting areas,” Student Body President Micaiah Krutsinger said. “We’ve had some unique ones … hopefully we’ll be able to look at these comments and really give the university feedback on areas they can improve.”
One of the most common complaints students had was the lack of air conditioning in dorm buildings. Other hot topics were parking, ranging from the university overselling CP passes to parking lots being in rough condition to drive through. Students also brought up accessibility concerns in some campus buildings and a lack of food options.
“One of the ones that was unique to me that I found interesting was professors who don’t use BlackBoard, so they require everyone to turn it in on paper,” Krutisinger said. “So when they need something in color, color costs students at UNI, so they aren’t able to turn their assignment in color, so that’s a disadvantage they’ve been having.”
Aside from creating a space for students to share what makes them unhappy, NISG also plans to use the information for the better.
“We move forward with different initiatives based off of these feedback and comments and see how we can implement change, so if that’s meeting with different faculty and leadership teams so we can bring awareness to that and we can advocate for that change, and hopefully some things get changed for the better,” Director of Diversity Christian Johnson said.
Krutsinger added, “It gives us some ideas on some initiatives that we might want to focus on this year or years after, and it gives us talking points so when we meet with university administration, we can discuss, like ‘we had this complain when we were talking to this student,’” he said.
In particular, NISG plans to take that feedback to the next Board of Regents meeting at the University of Iowa on Sept. 27-28.
“This helps structure what topics we want to bring up in our meeting with the Board of Regents,” Krutsinger said. “Obviously we won’t go up to them and bring up every little thing, but maybe bring up areas that are big that we’re seeing all over campus and we are really hearing students like, hey this is a problem.”
Outside of this annual event inviting students to share their troubles, Krutsinger encourages students to reach out to NISG for any complaints or concerns they have throughout the year. More information about NISG can be found at nisg.uni.edu.
