President Jason Morgan gave a presentation at Monday’s meeting of the Associated Students of NMU (ASNMU) about the results of a recent survey of NMU students’ views on the student government and what it should be doing as their representatives.
Of the 413 people who started the survey, 392 completed it. The highest numbers of participants were from the College of Arts and Sciences which had 247 responses.
The results showed that 84 percent of the people surveyed said “Yes” to the question “Do you think ASNMU should be taking positions on legislative issues affecting students (i.e. Michigan Promise Scholarship, Medical Amnesty, Guns on campus).” The results also showed that 51 percent of students thought that ASNMU should advocate for the legalization of marijuana, which Morgan said reaffirmed the organization’s decision to not take a stance on the issue.
“The survey showed that students don’t think that we should really be advocating one way or another on the marijuana issue,” he said.
Concerns about the legitimacy of the survey arose when Secretary of the Board Megan Schneider, a senior elementary education major, said that one person commented in the survey that the individual had taken the survey six different times.
“There is no way we can know how many times that one person could have taken the survey,” she said. “When you look through the numbers, there is no way to tell if they are (accurate) or not.”
Schneider said that even though some of the comments left on the survey were helpful, there wasn’t a definitive way to know how many comments were left by the same person or how many comments each person gave.
“There is some very good information that can be gained, but there is no way of knowing if people commented in different ways on the same issue.”
In other news, the board members approved $790 to the election budget to cover expenses such as laptop rentals and wages for polling station workers. The board also approved $400 to fund expenses for the Student Association of Michigan conference at Eastern Michigan University on April 9 -10.
