The dean of students office found the Social Council (SoCo) guilty of discrimination for its violation of the rights of the LBGT students and, as punishment, placed SoCo under probation. SoCo also must work more closely with the Director of Student Activities, is required to find an alternative method for organizing Computer Dating TAP, must advertise that event at least 10 days beforehand and must co-host an LBGT event before the end of the academic year. But this ruling fails to get at the underlying issue: SoCo discriminated, albeit unintentionally, against the LBGT community, but why?

SoCo's actions speak of a larger problem. Its active members tend to be drawn from a small demographic on campus, its meetings are not well publicized and SoCo events are often sprung on the campus at the last minute. SoCo should consider some restructuring in the way it handles meetings, planning and publicity to ameliorate such problems. Specifically, a campus-wide e-mail should be sent out notifying students and groups of planning meetings. SoCo could thereby involve more of the campus in event planning and benefit from the opinions of a more representative cross-section of campus.

That is not to say that SoCo isn't taking some of the necessary steps towards ameliorating these problems. SoCo and the SGO are hosting an open forum for students to express their ideas and concerns about SoCo. While this is an appropriate first step, they need to take a more active role in finding minority representatives.

In addition, though complainants requested it, SoCo has still not explicitly apologized to the campus. However, they did write a letter to <i>The Student</i> explaining the unintentional nature of their discrimination and justifying why they seemingly ignored last year's complaints-they were unaware that complaints were expressed because their predecessors failed to pass on that information. We cannot rightfully excuse campus organizations for not passing on important information from one administration to the next. We should, however, allow some understanding for the fact that such communication is difficult to execute flawlessly and some details will inevitably fall through the cracks of transition.

SoCo is a campus-wide organization that organizes a myriad of activities around campus, and whose devotion and work we respect. However, it still has the responsibility to account for the range of wants and needs of all students on campus-however difficult they may be. The issues surrounding Computer Dating TAP shouldn't be too difficult to sort out, but the scars of such unintentional discrimination are going to be harder to heal. The first steps are being taken in the form of outreach to the community at large, but the efforts can't stop there, nor should the campus let them.