On Monday, March 14 the Justice League instructed students to check their mailboxes through a campaign called "Your Mailbox Misses You." Ballots in the mailboxes proclaimed that meal plans at Brandeis are "clearly a rip-off," and asked students to indicate their concerns by checking boxes that correlated to prewritten lamentations about the meal plans. While this board commends student involvement in matters that directly affect our lives, we are disappointed by how the Justice League has handled this particular endeavor. According to its website, the Justice League "advocate[s] for a Brandeis that lives up to its ideals." In this effort, though, the League failed to make a persuasive argument for how it would effect change on this campus. The League did not specify exactly what its argument is, nor did the group provide a sophisticated rationale for its action.

Additionally, the ballots, which were theoretically created to gauge student opinions, provided only a one-sided forum that did not allow students to express varied points of view: Students could either agree with a League-proposed qualm by checking "Yes!" or abstain from voting as a means of expressing disagreement. In order for the Justice League to accurately gauge student opinions, they should have included multiple options on the ballots. As it stands, the lack of options will cause an unbalanced vote and does not allow for a diversity of student opinion. There is no way to know if the Justice League is actually representing students or if it is just using this vote to advance its own platform and support its own views, and presenting the results of this survey as indicative of student opinion is unfair to the student body.

The League says that it will "hand-deliver" the ballots to University President Frederick Lawrence; however, this indicates that the group is more concerned with causing a sensation than producing tangible results. In order to create a movement for change, the Justice League should research which administrators would be most able to aid its campaign and meet with them to find out what steps would be most appropriate to effect change.

One example of effective advocacy for change came this past week, when the Student Union held office hours, videotaping students' opinions about housing in the Shapiro Campus Center Atrium. Additionally, an e-mail was sent out on Feb. 15 containing a survey asking students what their top concerns were and proceeded to respond in a timely and effective way.

The format through which the Union gauged the opinion of the student body was much more appropriate than the ballots the Justice League utilized. The Justice League should consider following the Union's example and using a similar format-in which students are actually able to speak their minds- rather than asking students to check a box that may not capture the subtlety of individual students' ideas.

While the League's intention of advocating for students' interests is commendable, the execution of its ideas needs more planning and thought in order for the League to be as effective as it could be.