Generally speaking, when I'm kicked out of somewhere, I can see it coming. Examples: Just this past week, probably for the first time in human history, each stall in the men's room was occupied. When my bladder forced me to explore the option of vacating myself in the ladies' room, I was neither shocked nor surprised that I was asked to leave forthwith. Or last year, whenever my roommate had a romantically fortuitous evening with one of his peers-though he may have been disciplined at Tufts for it-his request for me to vacate the premises was almost expected. But this Saturday, sitting in the library at 5:50 p.m., I was caught entirely off guard. "The library's closing in 10 minutes," said the student working at the library.

"But its only 5:50 on a Saturday!"

"Exactly."

As I made my way to my room, I recalled an article I read in the Sept. 1 edition of the Justice about the reduction of library hours. "The Goldfarb Library and Gerstanzang Science Library have reduced their hours by eight and 62 hours, respectively, in light of recent surveys conducted by Library and Technology Services."

When I read the article shortly after it was published, I didn't think anything of that opening sentence, but after rereading it once I got back to my room, I became concerned for my health. I didn't remember taking any survey or even being invited to participate in one regarding library hours. The article explains how through the survey, LTS gleaned that funds would be better allocated toward more tech-oriented things like laptop stations and increased hours of operation of the LTS Help Desk, rather than keeping the library open longer.

I began to sweat, thinking that perhaps the way I've been spending my weekends this semester has caught up with me. Then I took an extremely unscientific poll, asking anyone I passed during the next hour if they took an LTS survey last year. Nobody did. In fact, not a single person I spoke with thought the new library hours, even considering the gains in technology, were a good thing. Students (even a grad student or two) have found the cuts to be a major inconvenience and feel that they have seriously interfered with late-night studying, especially during midterm season. With this year's substantial increase in on-campus student population, it seems counterintuitive to make the Shapiro Campus Center the only available study space after 6 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and after midnight on Sundays through Thursdays. (For those of us who don't remember or who weren't here during the Golden Age of library hours, Farber Library, aka the Green Room, used to be a staple of student studying, staying open until 2 a.m. on weekdays after the first week of school.)

Searching my Bmail inbox, I found an old email from LTS, providing some evidence suggesting that this survey actually was conducted. "Please be on the lookout for emails inviting you to participate [in the survey]-your feedback is important! ... LTS takes the results very seriously! Please take the time to fill out each survey if you are invited to participate."

Many a time have I felt left out of an exclusive, invite-only party, but never have I felt that way about not being invited to take a survey. Though it is slightly comforting to my ego to know that nobody I spoke with seems to have been invited to provide their opinions either, it's also deeply disturbing.

I highly doubt that the LTS staff nefariously conspired to produce fake results about students' hours of library use just so they could spend some extra cash on techie stuff. It seems that LTS sincerely sought out the voice of the general Brandeis population but in doing so made a very dangerous mistake. Counter to many closed-door and executive decisions that have been made here during this time of financial crisis, LTS is one of the few entities in this school that actually reached out to the students for their opinion. When University decisions are made unilaterally, there is often protest over the lack of student involvement. The reason the LTS cutbacks are so scary is because they were enacted under the pretense that they were based on the interest of the greater student population when they were actually based on a small, invite-only sampling.

It seems that the Student Union may be going in a similarly misguided direction in its sincere attempts to hear the voice of the general Brandeis population. The newly introduced involved_students listserv attempts to help better advocate for student interest by sending out weekly questionnaires about issues on campus. This is a theoretically terrific idea, but in an attempt to be ultra-considerate to students, the Union made a similar mistake-the questionnaires are only sent out to those who have signed themselves up for the listserv. By making the listserv self-selective, it currently only has 416 students subscribed to it-just 13 percent of our school.

There are many things on this campus that don't run smoothly and don't work well. More often than not, however, the University tries to make improvements and has the right idea to ask students what works best. The problem is that students don't realize the impact that their filling out of a survey could have on changes in the school. Even if I had been invited to take the LTS survey, there is a good chance that I may have deleted it along with some of the other dozens of mass mailings I get on a daily basis. I had no idea that the results could be used to eliminate my favorite midnight to 2 a.m. study space.

Students here can be pretty pathetic when it comes to making their voices heard by pressing a button; we saw that in the embarrassingly low voter numbers for Student Union elections. This isn't a Brandeis-specific problem: Just look at the super-low numbers of people who participate in the U.S. Census. We don't even know exactly how low they are because so many Census forms have been neglected.

Students need to know just how important their contributions are. There is, however, one example of when student survey-filling-out turnout is relatively higher, and that is in the Student Union-conducted ratings of classes. With these surveys, students see the immediate impact of their voice because they use the responses of other students to determine which classes they enroll in. The Union should take a cue from their one successful survey and make students realize the immediate impact of the humble act of filling out a form.

Brandeis will soon undergo a search for President Jehuda Reinharz's successor. Student Union President Andy Hogan '11 e-mailed us, promising "deep student input and involvement" in the selection process, which will lead up to one of the more important moments in this University's history. Let's hope that the Union figures out a way to involve both deep and broad student input, and is sure that it is more than just invite-only.