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This morning the staff at F Newsmagazine had a casual breakfast meeting with SAIC’s new(ish) President, Duke Rieter.

I don’t want to let all the secrets out of the bag, but here are a few details of the discussion (meh, what secrets? there are no secrets, we’re interested in what everyone thinks…)

The meeting was quite frank and open, and covered all sorts of student and school frustrations, including:

- The lack of a decent student space at SAIC (this is being worked on… )

- The lack of a decent newsroom / workspace for F Newsmagazine’s editors and designers

- Complaints about the First Year Program

- The lack of an illustration curriculum

- The fact that no one knows what F Newsmagazine means as a publication title and the name is confusing doesn’t have brand strength.

- The possibility of F Newsmagazine either having another name, or distributing differently (weekly, quarterly…?)

- The absolute CRAPNESS of the SAIC website. (How difficult it is to navigate, to find links, lack of student presence on the site…

- How great the current website for F Newsmagazine is. It IS! It rocks. Yay. Finally.

- The disconnections and lack of communication between different sections of SAIC (between departments, between the faculty, admin and students, and between grads and undergrads)

- How the financial crisis impacts International students

- The invisibility of SAIC - lots of people not knowing about it who… perhaps… ought to know

- The difficulty of putting on student events at the school - booking spaces, security, bureaucratic red tape…

- The lack of artwork actually visible around SAIC… unless you know where to look

Basically, what we took away from the meeting is that there is no reason to be complacent or defeatist at SAIC. If we think something needs to be addressed, changed, fixed, instituted - then now is the time to bring up the  issue, because we have a school President who, for the time being, is all ears. Whether or not that “listening” can actually correspond to actual changes will be a slow and complex process, but it’s certainly worth a try.