After having a nearly full Student Senate for an entire year last year, Missouri Southern students return to a campus that can’t even get enough Senate nominees to have an election.

With only 36 seats available and more than 5,000 students enrolled, one would think someone running for Senate would almost have to campaign in order to get a seat.

But not at Southern. This year the Senate fell 11 candidates short of having an election. That means the first Senate meeting will barely be two-thirds full.

And why wouldn’t one want to join the Senate? Maybe students don’t know what the Senate does and maybe it’s because no one got the memo.

But Senate is a very important part of what goes on at Southern. These “elected” individuals control the pursestrings to student activity fees. Nearly, every organization on campus will ask for money from Senate at one time or another. And of the nearly 80 organizations on campus, they couldn’t come up with one from each to campaign for a Senate seat.

Every time an organization asks the Senate to allocate money to its cause, at least one senator has to represent the organization. And if they don’t already have a representative, then one will be appointed.

In this scenario, the Senate is being asked to give money to a group that doesn’t care enough about what they’re doing to have a representative. If they don’t get the amount they are asking for, they will claim they weren’t represented fairly.

This is what we call preventive maintenance. Have a solution to the problem before it happens.