In the second half of a more than 10-hour meeting, the SGA voted early Thursday morning to revert the organization’s stucture back to a setup similar to what it was under former SGA president Jonathan Sachs.
Last year, the number of Student Government Association committees was cut from 12 to five to review legislation, and five new executive departments were created largely to enact SGA policy. SGA executives would no longer chair legislative committees and non-legislators would have to apply for any voting position, including committee chair.
But after a unanimous vote, those new departments were eliminated and committees will once again be charged with both policy and legislative work.
SGA President Steve Glickman made the changes because he said the structure this year eliminated the average student from the process.
“We’re changing to a model where students and legislators are able to interact, discuss and advocate together on behalf of the students,” he said. “Now students can have an active voice in committees when legislation is discussed.”
But Sachs said Glickman made these changes based on a misunderstanding of how the new system was meant to function.
“I think all year, [Glickman] used a much more perfect system in SGA as an excuse to account for his own lack of completion of his own initiatives,” he said. “It is completely and totally more inclusive to students, and to erase that is just going to be a detriment to the student body.”
Sachs said the old system overloaded legislators, making legislative processes less transparent to average students.
“[Glickman] lacks the capacity to understand how the system worked,” Sachs said.
While no amendments to the omnibus bill were proposed that specifically addressed these changes, another created plenty of controversy for the legislature.
South Campus Commons Legislator Lisa Crisalli proposed a successful amendment to remove the SGA logo from Student Entertainment Events materials — a stamp that SEE was previously required to include.
Crisalli said the logo requirement was a “vestigial remnant” of when SEE was an arm of the SGA — it is now an independent organization — and that by stamping it onto SEE materials, the SGA was taking credit for another organization’s work.
But Glickman argued that because SEE is funded in part by student activities fees, students should know the money comes from allocation by the SGA.
“Nearly a quarter of student activities fees goes to SEE,” said Vice President of Finance Andrew Steinberg, who pointed to the tiny, barely visible logo on a flier for a SEE event as proof it wasn’t misleading to students.
Most legislators took a different view — the prevailing one when the amendment passed.
“I don’t know why we have this phallus-driven need to put our logo on everything,” said Anton Medvedev, an outlying commuter legislator.
Two new positions were also created: a critical activist position, a self-nominated position that will be filled with the legislature’s approval, was proposed by Medvedev, who will evaluate the performances of legislators on a weekly basis, and a transfer student legislator position, proposed by Denton Legislator Ian Winchester.
aisaacs at umdbk dot com
