It’s time, folks. Shut your mouths and throw away your ballots, because the student body has collectively decided starting today, it will have no voice whatsoever in its own governance. After all, with Ervin “Kipp kip Kipparoo” Cox, Professor Jacqueline “bewitchin'” Hitchon, and the UW “Eye of Sauron” administration in the driver’s seat, your seatbelts will undoubtedly be snug enough to choke the life out of your rights.

That’s correct — this year’s winners of the people’s choice award have decided that, when arguing against allowing students to have a lawyer speak for them at disciplinary hearings, they speaks for campus. In a letter to the Board of Regents, Hitchon stated, without reservation, “our campus supports a return to the October 2008 draft revision,” a revision in which lawyers would not be allowed to speak on behalf of students.

Self-aggrandizing declarations as to one’s popularity aside, we are immensely grateful that Hitchon has stepped up to handle this burden. Who is the student body, anyway? Only a bunch of semi-literate troglodytes, almost all of whom are qualified to vote in national elections and hold down jobs. But hey, why ask them? After all, with the Associated Students of Madison holding a long, tragic group whack-off session in their new pleasure palace it’s almost impossible to find a real student these days.

It’s not that our self-appointed representatives of the people want to oppose the granting of a right at least some students support. Such an opposition would only grant our friends in administration the status of another one of those dime-a-dozen authoritarians that proliferate in the halls of Bascom and Pyongyang, North Korea. Rather, what catapults our most estimable Professor Hitchon into the realm of Headliner Award worthiness is her claim to speak for “the campus.” In Hitchon’s mind, campus must be a very specific group. The Office of the Dean of Students, perhaps? Scanner Dan? Frodo Baggins? As far as we are concerned, Hitchon does not speak for us, nor does she speak for a very large constituency of students who are very, very upset with the Board of Regents giving students their constitutional rights.

In the words of our noble friends in the second Floor Helen C. White men’s bathroom: “What the fuck is she talking agrout?” Beyond speaking to a handful of Shared Governance representatives and perhaps holding a few forums, what can the administration point to as concrete evidence that all of campus, universally, supports the policy? Such condescension assumes a pretty sizeable chunk of stupidity on the part of the students Hitchon claims to represent. But then again, if we weren’t stupid, why would we need an administrator to speak for the entire campus?

So thanks, Hitch. But this is one dictatorship of the Proletariat we’ll take a pass on. And lawyers or no lawyers, consider yourself served.