As one of the two candidates for Student Government Association president this year, I am writing this guest column after the elections are over so it’s clear I’m raising journalistic and not campaign issues.
The Diamondback ran two stories, “SGA presidential hopefuls face off on diversity issues” (April 7) and “Allegations arise over SGA presidential hopeful’s past,” (April 8) that I would like to respond to. The former states that I called an Action Party candidate “the party’s token minority representative.” The latter alleges that I inappropriately suggested two expenditures in my capacity as Terpoets’ president. Let me clarify what actually happened.
The first article concerned the April 6 diversity debate between Kaiyi Xie, the Action Party’s presidential candidate, and myself, the Love Party candidate. I made the point that the Love Party ticket significantly over-represented minorities in proportion to student population and that the Action Party ticket significantly under-represented minorities by the same standard. Xie’s response to this was to point to Jamil Scott, the Action Party’s candidate for vice president of academic affairs, and to note that they were indeed diverse because she was a minority. Thus Xie, not I, injected Scott into the conversation. I simply countered that Xie’s statement was a tokenizing response.
The second article quotes two Terpoets executive board members who made several accusations, including that I “promised” the Stylus literary magazine some of Terpoets’ funding in the fall. In reality, I never promised any funds to Stylus but merely gauged room for collaboration and suggested it as an option.
The article also cites two expenditures that were set aside for projects Terpoets had co-sponsored with The Love Movement, another group for which I served as president. While the article never directly quotes any Terpoets board members accusing me of allocating this without their full support, it seems to suggest it through what I see as a conspiratorial tone. And I want to be clear: The Terpoets executive board voted unanimously in favor of funding both of these projects prior to me setting aside any money in our budget.
Finally, I want to clarify the reason why this money was never spent. Using language straight out of a Law & Order episode — such as “The money never made its way out of the Terpoets account” — this article, in my opinion, leads readers to assume that it was reallocated because I got caught. However, this money was not spent because of other, unrelated reasons (i.e. it ended up not being needed), an important fact that should have received greater prominence than it did in the article.
I did make some mistakes as the leader of Terpoets. Communication is one thing, but this article makes very serious allegations of “ethically questionable practices” while lacking evidence and failing to give due prominence to some very important facts that disprove these claims.
This he-said, she-said article was befitting of a tabloid, not The Diamondback, a publication which will need to earn back my pride and respect.
Ben Simon is a junior government and politics major and former candidate for SGA president. He can be reached at ben dot lee dot simon at gmail dot com.