One of the many mercies of summertime comes in allowing one’s email inbox to breathe a bit. Sure, during the academic year it behooves students to keep their Crimson accounts tidy, ideally with zero unread messages at all times. But those lazy, hazy, crazy days are here. There are 297 new messages in my inbox, and I feel fantastic. I haven’t read an email in months. Honestly, how important could one unread email (or 297) from Cold Stone Creamery be?

I made an exception, however, to this admittedly unsound blasé attitude to look over a recent email message sent to students from President Bonner detailing the search committee for UA’s next Vice President for Student Affairs. The committee, as listed in the email, is certainly an impressive roster. I’ve had the pleasure of working with several members of the committee through my involvement with Spectrum and Safe Zone, and I’m sure all involved have intentions of finding the best possible VPSA for our campus community.

But I am disappointed in the lack of representation on the committee from a few key areas. Most confusingly, the search committee for the VP of Student Affairs seems seriously lacking in actual students. Only one undergraduate student was named to sit on the committee, SGA President Hamilton Bloom, and no graduate students are apparent in the list emailed by Dr. Bonner.

In addition to seeming immediately counterintuitive, the lack of student appointees goes against precedent set in recent months by similar committees at UGA, Rutgers, UC San Diego and the University of Louisiana, to name a few, all of which included multiple undergraduate and graduate students. Just a few weeks ago, our friends at University of Alabama in Huntsville launched a search committee for a new VP of Student Affairs that invited, not one, but several diverse student voices to be part of the conversation.

As a student at the Capstone, I can’t help but attribute this oversight to a storied trend of UA administration not properly involving students in decisions made at our school. I don’t need to remind anyone that the past year has been a landmark one in the way students, particularly at the undergraduate level, have found a voice and demanded more action and more transparency from university leaders. It’s disheartening to see that voice be effectively dismissed by the absence of students to give first hand experience on this new committee.

Vice President of Student Affairs is a position that holds a great deal of power in shaping the future of the University. I urge the members of the search committee to make up for the lack of student voices among you by reaching out to students on your own accord in order to form the most complete picture of who should be appointed to that position. I would be overjoyed to give you my thoughts via email just as soon as I decide to start checking mine again.

Noah Cannon is a senior majoring in telecommunication and film.