Some day very soon, in between chants and beer, U of T frosh may have to learn the foxtrot.

This week, students here will get a chance to do something rarely possible on this big and anonymous campus. At 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, at Sidney Smith, room 1086, students are invited to tell the folks at the University of Toronto Students’ Union (formerly SAC) what they want out of their new student centre. You know-you agreed to pay for this baby in 2005 in a campus-wide student plebiscite, and it has been inching its way through faculty committees ever since.

Administrators are now busy deciding what this new space will hold, and they want student input before drawing up the blueprints. Among some of the standout ideas so far are a cheaper, healthier food court, more space for student groups to hold meetings, a study and lounge area, and a big, multipurpose “ballroom”-a space meant for formals, large extracurricular lectures, or even dancing. Even dancing.

A dedicated grand hall designed for dancing, like the one that McGill University Student Centre has? Could it get any better?

Yes, it can: “this facility would be ideally rented by student groups at no cost,” goes the UTSU discussion paper on the new centre, which is currently available for download from their website under Thursday’s event listings.

Of course, the ideal doesn’t automatically translate into the actual, and that’s why it’s crucial that students take part in the planning process for our new centre. We won’t bore you with a history lesson, but U of T students have been fighting for a student centre for eons, and now that we’re finally going to get one, we need to micromanage every brick that goes into it.

Unfortunately, as of now it has a pretty lame name-the Student Commons-but we encourage you to look past that.

You know you want your space. You want a place to study and hang out that doesn’t assault you with Robartsian brutalism. More places to eat on campus that serve varied kinds of food-halal, vegan, locally-farmed, or simply anything without a Starbucks or Pizza Pizza logo. Space to have campus club meetings, to pray, to relax, to conspire, to write manifestoes, to watch movies, to make movies, to rehearse with your band, to meditate, to eat, and to simply breathe.

A committee to review existing student activity space revealed that-surprise, surprise-students at U of T don’t do much on campus aside from studying and going to classes. On the whole, we don’t join clubs and we don’t do extracurriculars, and that’s a shame, since it’s sometimes the time you don’t spend in class at university that ends up deciding what you’ll do for the rest of your life-whether that’s getting into politics, fighting for human rights, discovering a passion for theatre, mastering the 400-metre dash, saving the planet, or writing for a newspaper.

So let your voice be heard at the meeting. Let UTSU know what issues you care about so they can best represent you to the boardroom table mucky-mucks.

You might even get to rename it yourself.