In case you haven’t seen it, SGA Press Secretary Jeremiah Johnson (frequent commenter) started a Facebook group called “Keep SGA!” with the hopes of convincing you to vote to keep SGA on campus.
More like conniving students into believing lies:
Without SGA this year…
- There’d be no online Key
Dead wrong!
The Black Tie Party saved the Key. The Key is not just this year’s copy of the grade records, it is all of the ones from the past. That is why it means so much to students! So we can look at all those records and see a professor’s grading records. And SGA didn’t nothing to save those. It was the effort of Noah Mink to save those pages because if he had not had the forethought, all those records would be gone for eternity. Look for yourself, as the SGA website even links to the Black Tie Party page with the Key records.
SGA hasn’t even put the fall semester grades up!
- The parking on the IM Fields might have gone unchallenged
Wrong!
It was members of the Intramural teams that brought this issue up at Open Mic with Mike. They challenged! You helped, but if SGA wasn’t around, they still would have challenged. Your statement is false!
- Efforts for a student bill of rights and a medical amnesty policy would be non-existent
True, but…
You haven’t gotten a student bill of rights or a medical amnesty policy approved! These terms sound nice, but until they are codified and put into action, they are merely placeholders in SGA’s book of achievements!
- We’d have no Fall Break
True, but…
SGA let our Fall Break get cut. Fall Break got cut in half. SGA saved half of Fall Break. Thanks, guys.
This year saw the budget process overhauled
True, but…
New rules don’t work if they aren’t enforced. There was an SGA event this week (!!!) that didn’t meet the new SGA budget regulations and it was allowed to continue!
and the election process reformed
True, but…
It apparently didn’t work that well, because students have NO CHOICE in their representation this year!
Lastly…
To increase accessability, office hours for senators and appointed positions were increased
But… WRONG!
Office hours were not increased. Even if they were, where do you find your Senator’s office hours? Where is the SGA handbook on how to find your representatives? And why don’t your representatives, who want your vote soo badly that they make Facebook groups and events, come search out their constituents?
If you want our votes, represent us! Talk to us! Come search us out, make yourself known, don’t sit in an office in the basement of Tate doing your homework during your “office hours” and tell us SGA deserves a chance. No, you do none of this. You are the ones that are causing our representation to crumble more and more every day.
{ 4 } Comments
There are many errors in this commentary. I’ll have a response soon.
I enjoyed seeing the followed posted by a concerned student in the Save SGA group:
“Without SGA this year,
There would still be Fall Break and an Online Key.
People would have still complained about the IM fields like they were before SGA got involved, yet everything would have calmed down once a game weekend actually occurred and the users of the IM fields could actually see whether or not UGA lived up to its word to clean the fields properly.
The Collegiate Readership Program is wasteful ($45,000??? there was nothing better for that?) as anyone interested in those papers can read them online for free. (And USA Today? Seriously?)
The efforts might not exist, just like the bill of rights and amnesty policy also don’t exist.
Considering no one even bothered running to try and prevent the transferral of power this year, it’s funny that this election is either for SGA or against it.
All of this is unnecessary as everyone knows that there is no way that 2/3 of the voters will vote to abolish SGA and it will continue about its merry way.”
Also, I love the bit about SOS redoing polling to make it more face-to-face. When will they take a POLS course and realize that for a poll to have any credibility, it needs to be scientific?
I should comment on the portion relevant to me. First of all, I think SGA deserves some credit for the Key — I wouldn’t say SGA singlehandedly saved it, as that would discount the role played by the hundreds or thousands of students who joined Facebook groups, lobbied administrators, wrote editorials, etc., in support of bringing it back. HOWEVER, in the end, it was Jamie (and, I believe, Katy Bowers) with the ultimate responsibility, as they were the ones holding meetings and negotiating with administrators to make sure future versions would be available. You can give me credit for the old stuff if you want (though it wasn’t exactly something I’d planned out), but future Key users do owe something to this SGA.
As for this past Fall’s grades, you certainly know there is a lot of red tape and unforeseen stuff, especially regarding the change to plus/minus. It’s unfortunate that both +/- and the SGA version of The Key started at about the same time, since that makes it harder to coordinate what records can go where. I don’t have first-hand knowledge about this semester, but from what I learned from spring semester and have heard through the grapevine, I have faith that our representatives are doing as much as they can, though they are unfortunately stuck with a fairly inflexible university administration.
I’ll stay out of the other stuff, but I wanted to make sure the contributions to the Key made by Jamie, Katy and Cory Watson (the SGA webmaster) aren’t ignored, as they are considerable.
Chris, I’ll have my response to this post within the hour.
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