Letters to the Editor

Fellow students,

This week, from Tuesday to Thursday, there was supposed to be an election to ratify a new SGA
Constitution. Unfortunately, nobody knew about it.

The entire process, as it seems, has been shrouded in secrecy and ill will. There are three items of concern I wish to expound on:

1. The topic on which the students are supposed to vote – the new constitution – has not sufficiently been publicized. The profile of this issue is so low that the students cannot render an informed decision, or even participate in the process.

The bylaws pf the new constitution not finished until Feb. 2, hardly any time has been provided for the students to digest the material being presented to them. The other concern I have on this issue is that this material is not being presented to the students. The proposed new constitution and bylaws have been posted only on the SGA Web site, they have not been circulated to the students, e-mailed along with the VCU TelegRAM, or published in The CT. Even a perfunctory posting of the document in the University Student Commons would have provided some air of openness and availability.

2. The vote itself appears to be secret because it was so unpublicized. Hardly any mention of the election was made on the MyVCU portal, in the TelegRAM, on VCU Alert, or in any other media. If I hadn’t asked about the matter on an obscure Facebook group, I wouldn’t know that the elections were scheduled for this week.

Even after this week’s stink that I kicked up, almost nobody outside of the SGA has been made aware of the process. I understand that most students don’t care about this issue, but 99 percent of the student body doesn’t know that there is an election. Even the most basic posting of notices significantly would have increased awareness.

3. The current constitution doesn’t allow for us to just formulate a new one. I believe these changes are made in the interest of expediency for the legislative branch of SGA. My concern isn’t so much that I disagree with the changes, but there is no authority for the SGA to make these changes. The SGA Constitution as it stands, has a process to change it, which is not being followed. Nowhere does it mention a referendum. The method the SGA is using is unconstitutional.

These three items, taken together, give the appearance of an SGA that is trying to put one over on the student body. They seem to want a fast, quiet vote, with as little student involvement as possible.

I firmly believe that the SGA would have been happy to vote in secret and push these self-interested changes through.

I presented these three concerns to the SGA judiciary board, and they’ve issued an injunction, stopping the election until we meet on Friday. It is my hope that they will delay the election for a sufficient period of time to allow for the student body, as a whole, to become aware of and involved in this process.

In a year when VCU’s chief of police is under arrest, we give out unearned degrees and the money we take for research has strings attached, the last thing we should be doing is giving off the air of impropriety. Our integrity is already challenged; let’s not finish off what’s left.

Respectfully,
Joe Anderson

Dear Students,

An interesting turn of events came to pass this last year for VCU Student Government Association. After failed attempts in prior years to begin an active conversation regarding the current constitution, the joint committee decided that a Constitutional Reform Committee comprising of two members from each branch was to be created.

I had the distinct honor of being selected by my senate peers to serve on this committee. The rest of the committee was made up of Sen.Josh Ronk and SGA Vice President Raymond Barefoot, both appointed by the SGA president, and Justices Joshua Maye and Tsion Tesfaye. I personally sought out constructive ideas on what reform SGA members thought the organization needed. At our meetings the six of us, armed with knowledge of the problems that SGA faced, sat down and had a very well thought out discussion on the role of student government at VCU.

It is my belief that the new constitution put forth by the committee is far superior to the old one. The old constitution is based on a federal model, with three branches with distinct roles. The three-branch model, like the federal government, breeds conflict. This conflict is intentional in real government. Our founding fathers believed that an overactive government was bad and sought to install mechanisms to slow quick or hasty progress.

However, this type of government is unsuitable for VCU’s student body. The conflict that occurs is needless. Two individuals, one elected by the student senate as committee chairs and one appointed by the president as directors, both are told to do the same thing. They have constitutionally interlinked responsibilities; however, the appointed individual has no one but the president to answer to. He or she is not, in every case, required to work in tandem with the chairs of the committees and no progress report is given to the committees.

This causes both branches to work toward the same goals independently. It is my belief, along with the Constitutional Reform Committee, that we can do better.

The new constitution combines the executive branch and the legislative branch to create a student council form of government. The president’s “cabinet” as we know it, would be the chairs of the senate committees. He would retain three individuals who would assist him in his presidential obligations outside of the senate leadership. The president would attend every senate meeting, an obligation he currently does not have. This new document reduces the size of student government, saves the organization money as well as increasing efficiency. The money that would be saved would be funneled directly back to the student body.

Arguments against the new document are feeble at best. The only claims that have been brought to my attention is that the new constitution and the voting were not made public soon enough. The document was first introduced in the Senate in late November; it then went on to be passed by the senate in early December. Several meetings were held by the committee and the president to iron out some compromises, and the document was re-passed by the senate along side of the SGA’s bylaws.

Every time there was a vote on the documents, the documents passed in the senate overwhelmingly. Publicity might have been a problem. It certainly is a problem that the SGA continually addresses. However, all of the individuals raising complaints against the new document are doing so despite the fact that had they been interested before the day of the special election, the information would have been right at their fingertips.

The new constitution would create a stronger and more efficient institution as well as improve the relationship between the SGA and the student body.

-Darrell Coffey