The Lion’s Roar (TLR): Senate Bill 36 in the ongoing Louisiana Legislature would prohibit smoking on community and technical college campuses along with Louisiana State University, University of Louisiana and Southern University’s campuses. Do you believe this is the right direction for Louisiana colleges if this bill were to pass? Should it come from the legislature down or should universities decide for themselves?
Crovetto: Right now, the fact that the state wants to cut all the money that they would like to give to us, yet they’d like to hand down a decision to us that people cannot smoke on our own campus, I feel like they are not in their place right now where they have the ability to do that. I feel like they should be worrying about more things than trying to ban smoking on campus. They should be trying to figure out ways to help out the colleges in the state right now and trying to give us a better allocation of money than worrying about if people are smoking on campus or not. I’m not necessarily saying it’s a bad thing, I know a lot of people have problems with [smoking on campus], and I understand where people are coming from, but for the state to [potentially] hand that down when they have many other problems with us and the budget crisis. I don’t think it’s the best thing to be worrying about right now in the state government.
TLR: What do you specifically plan on doing to get in touch with the student body?
► I think we really just need to tap into different avenues. One idea somebody brought to me was that they think SGA should not only put out an athletic newsletter but an arts newsletter as well, and I think that’s a great idea to try and get an arts newsletter together. We have so many events on campus in Pottle and with the music department and we have different artists to come play, sing, we have different art galleries. Just the arts as a whole, there are so many people involved in it. That whole department, there’s a lot of people that really stay and some of them stay within the art department, and if we were able to get the students out and say ‘Hey, listen, look at what we have this week. You can go to these athletic games, but you can also go to these concerts, and you can also go to this play at the Columbia Theatre this week’ because it’s constantly people doing these things, and I feel like it’s a big aspect of the university that gets lost though, because students don’t know about it. It’s a great way to get more people involved and to have people understand that they are there and maybe get people in those organizations to join too. I think that’s one step, but we’re going to have to figure out some other ways.
TLR: SGA has somewhat become a Greek club because of the amount of Greeks involved in student government. Why is there a lack of diversity within SGA?
► I really feel like the reason there are so many Greeks is just because the Greeks are so involved on campus. The Greeks are the ones that put on homecoming. Greeks are the ones that put their money, time and effort into it when it comes to basketball games or football games. They are predominately going to be the most that show up and have the most pride. They have the pride in the organization they are in, therefore they have pride in Southeastern because that organization wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for Southeastern. They put a lot towards it. They want to give back. They want to have an incentive. They have more involvement because they have a friend that does it and so the friend gets in it and they form a collective group they want to get involved. I feel like that’s the reason why. I don’t feel like it’s necessarily been a negative thing and I don’t think anything gets passed that is just for Greeks or anything because we aren’t able to do that. I don’t think it causes any problems.
I know Branden [Summers] this semester appointed so many senators this spring and majority of them weren’t Greek. It just depends on who applies, who runs, and also when people run they have the backing of their organization so it’s easier for them to run with the organization that backs them because people who are in organizations are going to clearly support the people that are in their organization. It’s a very tight-knit community and they all care about the university very much. That’s why it’s so predominate.