I like reporting on politics, not being part of them.
But that’s exactly what happened last week during the Student Senate elections when the freedom of the press at USM was challenged. Some members of the Student Senate didn’t think there was anything wrong with asking students to vote on a proposal to dissolve the Student Communication Board, the governing body of The Free Press and WMPG. I was a little concerned that the decision to put the question on the ballot took place just two weeks before the election and probably 98 percent of the student body had never heard of the SCB.
So we tried to educate them.
Several staff members of The Free Press and WMPG stood in front of the polls to tell anyone who’d listen to vote “No” on Question #3. We handed out flyers and explained the situation to all those who cared enough to ask. And you may have noticed I wrote a front-page editorial in last week’s paper with a “Vote No on 3” headline that took up half the front page.
And you responded. Almost 85 percent of the voters agreed that it doesn’t make sense to give student government ANY kind of control over the media (See story on page 6). The vote was not close. I’d even use the term “landslide victory” to describe it.
The students have spoken. And it wasn’t a whisper.
Let’s hope the Senate listened.
The Senate was almost evenly divided on the issue. Its constituency was not.
The past two weeks weren’t any fun for me and I’d be willing to guess the rest of the people involved had better things to do with their time as well.
Let’s do everybody a favor and not go through this again.
If there’s anything good that came out of this controversy, it’s that people from both sides came together (a few times) to try to work out a compromise. We sat down with those who most wanted to dissolve the SCB and asked them why. We asked them how the SCB could be better and we all worked on re-writing its constitution to make it more effective.
We openly voiced our concerns and found out we had pretty similar ideas about how to make the SCB better. We talked about it and we got something done.
If somebody has a problem with student media in the future why don’t we take something from what happened and talk about it first. There’s really no need for surprise votes and backroom politics.
It was good to see a lot of write-in candidates in this year’s election and some strong leaders who will be returning. Maybe things will change next year.
After last week’s dramatic campaigning I had only one student senator call me to talk about it. Leah Wentworth didn’t agree with my position. She didn’t like some of my tactics. So she decided to tell me about it.
She listened to me and I listened to her. We saw each other a little later and we talked some more.
There was another senator who disagreed with our campaign. Ben Hoffman decided to confront one of my staff members while she was talking to a voter on election day.
But he didn’t want to do any talking. He decided instead to get in my staff member’s face and call her a liar. He grabbed the flyers she was holding and said they were full of lies. This prompted the voter she had been talking to to ask the senator if he was “trying to intimidate” my staff member.
Both senators will be on the Senate next year. One of them has proven she is a good leader and earned my respect.
Let’s hope next year’s Senate leadership will learn from this year’s problems and really look out for the best interests of its students. USM has some real problems. How about doing something about next year’s outrageous mandatory parking fee or helping to keep dorms a little more safe.