This letter is written in response to the Daily’s April 18 editorial titled “Will the new GSB please do something?”

I am a newly elected senator from the graduate college, and look forward to serving my term in what has so far been a very enthusiastic senate. I personally welcome the Daily’s challenge for GSB senators to “accomplish something with the time they are allotted in these positions of power.” However, I would also like to take this opportunity to express a few of my own concerns.

As members of a shared community, all students need to share the burden of what I like to call “progressive responsibility.” Essentially, it means that we all have a duty to constructively criticize. It is very easy to say what someone did wrong; the Daily’s editorial exemplified the kind of criticism that offers little in the way of progressive direction. It is unhelpful rhetoric to demand that the GSB senate “accomplish something” without doing your part to be clear about what the “something” is. Perhaps that “something” is fighting tuition increases. Indeed, as a member of a senate that strives to work with students and not just for them, it would have been much more helpful to elaborate on that specific concern. I promise to do my best in the upcoming year to address that issue.

To be sure, senators need to recognize their own special role in the legislative process — a role that entails actively recruiting information from our constituents about what issues they would like to see addressed. I also have great faith in this senate’s ability to do just that. But innovation is not just the senate’s responsibility. This is a burden that belongs to us all, and as members of a community whose lives are impacted by the legislative decisions made therein, it is a burden we should all care deeply about.

Dan Christenson

Graduate Student

Political Science

GSB Graduate College Senator