For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of sitting through an ASM Student Council meeting, let me tell you, it’s a real thrill: over five hours of riveting open forum and adherence to parliamentary procedure, among other thrilling events that I’ll leave you to go observe for yourself.

As for the particulars of Tuesday’s meeting, almost the entirety was devoted to the election of new ASM leadership positions. Of particular emphasis was the fairly heated debate over who should fill the chair position — the race between Representatives Tyler Junger and Brian Benford.

What came as a surprise to me was the main point of discussion was how Student Council needed to be united and divisive actions would not be tolerated. The especially unexpected part for me was that the driving force behind this point of emphasis seemed to be coming from those representatives elected as part of the FACES slate. The point of this column is not to question their honesty or integrity; in fact I’m inclined to believe they truly want to have a united council (no pun intended).

The real question is where they value agreement within ASM in relation to the supposed far-left progressive agenda that they were elected to push. I will be the first to admit — and in fact I wrote an entire column about it — that nothing in their agenda was really all that far from mainstream campus politics.

The problem with all of this lies not in any of their goals of council unity and pushing an agenda that the majority of campus can agree with, but in how that image they attempted to portray Tuesday night conflicts radically with the way they campaigned and presented themselves in the campaign. By portraying themselves as the heirs to the Vote No Coalition and by soliciting the endorsements of groups like the ISO, CAN, SPD and SLAC they campaigned as the far-left, progressive candidates who touted their grassroots organizing capabilities.

There is no particular problem with either of these seemingly mutually exclusive images that the FACES candidates want to give themselves. There are certainly a significant number of students who want representatives on Student Council pushing either of these viewpoints.

But they can live up to both. Pushing a progressive agenda will inherently serve to divide ASM as there are many representatives who do not share their vision. While it might not be evident now, eventually FACES is going to pick between their vision of unity that they’ve expressed so far on council and the image of the group that SSFC and FACES member Kyle Szarzynski articulated on his blog in which “FACES and progressive allies will then control the grassroots committee.”

For now they might be able to pull off walking the tightrope between ASM unities and progressive activists, but eventually they will be forced to choose between the two. When they do, they’re going to disappoint either their constituents who voted to send them to Student Council to advance a far-left agenda or their fellow council members to whom they promised to be united behind. Either FACES is a political party designed to push an agenda within Council or it is merely a group of students who came together behind a shared platform to help push the campaign process toward more substantive policy issues. It can’t be both.

Patrick McEwen (p[email protected]) is a sophomore majoring nuclear engineering.