Today is the last day of voting in the 2003 Undergraduate Student Government elections. No matter who wins, one thing is for certain: Eddie Pauline’s two-term reign as USG president will come to an end. The person who has been the major representative for nearly 40,000 undergraduates will soon be a lame- duck president.

Pauline was first elected president in 2001 and was re-elected in 2002. Both times he won in a landslide – receiving about half of the votes cast each time. While this appears to make Pauline the popular presidential choice, those figures are tainted because barely 10 percent of the student population actutally voted. Pauline tried really hard in his presidency and tried to implement what he believed were good programs. The problem was nobody cared.

During his presidency, Pauline thought it would be a good idea to expand the USG senate so students could have better representation inside their student government. This was certainly a laudable task, as communication lines between the student body and its government would be drastically improved. But no one really took advantage of the situation. When the extra seats for the senate opened up for this year’s election, there were not enough people interested to even fill some of the ballots. For several of the seats, anybody could have chosen to be on the ballot and then run unopposed, but nobody cared to.

To solve the problem of student apathy, Pauline tried to tell students about all the wonderful things USG does for them and that USG is very important to this university. It fell on deaf ears.

There’s a USG newsletter that tells the world everything USG does. Also in the newsletter, Pauline and a variety of other people in USG express their views on many issues. Few people outside the USG office even know it exists.

Near the end of his presidency, Pauline tried to take the issues to the students by attempting to form a student activity fee and tackling the problems surrounding the honors college. This did actually wake up some students to the power USG has to change their lives at the university. Frankly, many students became concerned that USG could add $45 in payments to the university for a student activity fee.

Pauline believes the activity fee would be wildly popular, based mostly on a USG survery that said over 70 percent of students supported the fee. The survery results were skewed since instead of asking “Would you be willing to pay $15 a quarter to fund student organizations?” it asked “Would you like a free Eminem concert at Ohio State?” Of course over 70 percent of students would say they want something free. So, in this case, Pauline is trying to implement something that he can’t be sure the students actually support.

With the honors college, his efforts are too little and too late. The honors college is definitely not where it needs to be right now, and Pauline deserves congratulations for trying to bring about reform. However, the changes he is talking about would take several years, and he waited until there was less than a quarter left in this presidency to even make it an issue.

Thus, in a few weeks, Pauline’s two-year reign as USG president will end. No one can deny that he did not try hard or take a stand for what he believed it. It is just too bad that hardly anybody cared.