Without more than half its members, Student Council can’t vote, so important business gets postponed until the next meeting, when hopefully more than a handful of members show up.
At issue Thursday, among other business like the homecoming budget, was the confirmation of Shared Government appointees, many of whom are freshmen looking to serve non-controversial positions on the information technology committee or lectures committee.
Two of those committees, however, Rec. Sports and the Health Care Advisory Committee, each send a shared-gov-chosen rep to sit on one of the most crucial of committees, the Student Services Finance Committee. Here is where the maneuvering started.
Under the veil of exams and other obligations, several members of the student council didn’t show. But one council rep, Dan Dogs of CALS, revealed that he had been invited to participate in what now looked like a boycott.
Mr. Dogs explained that several members were concerned that the nominees for the joint shared governance/SSFC seats were political puppets, inexperienced, uninterested in their non-SSFC appointments and only concerned with swinging the SSFC to the left.
As the non-meeting ended, some yelled openly, badgering the now-gloomy underclass nominees to write letters to the editor, chiding the missing reps for “obstructionism.” One Council rep announced that it showed the missing members “didn’t care.”
I disagree. Boycotting the process or “throwing a wrench in the gears” has long been a valid tactic. More importantly, the concern of the ghost members strikes directly at viewpoint neutrality — we need to be sure that those students appointed to SSFC are not only familiar with the process, but are also not politically swayed. Had there been rumors of conservative members trying to pack the SSFC, liberals would howl.
My complaint is that, as a Health Care Advisory Committee and SSFC appointee, I wasn’t given a chance to prove otherwise. I have never met any of the absent committee members. I didn’t get to talk of my experience with the health-care system, or my concerns about health-care access. I didn’t get a chance to tell them my view of SSFC’s moral obligation to seg-fee-paying students.
Last Thursday, I planned to speak to both health-care and viewpoint-neutrality issues at the meeting’s open forum, and then open myself to questions. It didn’t happen.
Instead, accusations and rumors authored by the outgoing SSFC members (who I also haven’t met) were legitimated by default, with no investigation.
If the members of the student council who boycotted Thursday’s meeting are as concerned about the legitimacy of appointees and the neutrality of the SSFC as their actions suggest, then I invite them to take the time to investigate the nominations before them.
Josh Orton
Health Care Advisory Committee, SSFC nominee
