We all get the emails a couple of times each quarter: Chancellor Coombe is holding office hours soon, and would love to have a ten-minute interview with any student who wants the opportunity to provide feedback on DU.

Unfortunately, this entire process seems to be no more than a scheme to make the upper administration appear more accessible to students than it actually is. While not honoring and carrying out the feedback students provide, the office hours are simply a show by the administration.

In September, I came across my first of these emails. Being the kind of person who likes to provide feedback for the betterment of any group or institution that I am a part of, I eagerly signed up for the chance to meet with Coombe.

At the meeting, he recognized me from the Chancellor’s Dinner I had recently attended with my FSEM, and we took half of a minute to discuss something we had both read in The New York Times that morning. Coombe came off as  approachable even before I had a chance to fully introduce the topic I wanted to discuss.

I then spoke to him about the need for more bike racks on campus and the need for a designated bikeway connecting the north and south of campus. These were two issues that stood out to me despite only being on campus for a couple of weeks. There always seemed to be no extra room at any of the bike racks outside of J-Mac and Nelson, and bikers heading to class competed with those walking on the red brick paths.

I told him that it is hypocritical to require all bikes locked on campus to be secured on a rack when there was not enough rack space altogether.  I also suggested either a new north-south bikeway roughly paralleling the path from J-Mac past Nelson, Nagel and Driscoll up to Sturm or a new bike lane on High Street.

While I talked, Coombe’s assistant took notes over the conversation, which I believed to be a good sign for future progress. Coombe then thanked me for the feedback and gave the impression that he would start looking for solutions to these issues soon.

That was September. This is April. I haven’t so much as heard rumblings about the planning of a bikeway or a bike lane, and there are no new bike racks near J-Mac or Nelson.

I know that implementation of ideas is far more complicated than it appears from the outside, but to see no tangible progress in half a year’s time is completely disappointing. It makes me feel that going to the office hours was nothing more than a waste of my time.

I’ve unfortunately come to believe that chancellor office hours are not much more than a PR gimmick to give students the impression that they have more say over what happens on campus. While I wish this wasn’t the case, it unfortunately appears to be so.

If they are going to keep sending out these emails encouraging students to come meet with the chancellor, then they need to step up their game.

Should office hours continue to be publicized to students, it is only fair that their feedback be taken seriously and not sit waiting to be forgotten in notebooks tucked away on the bookshelves of the Mary Reed Building.