Hatin’ SGA

SGA Press Secretary Jeremiah Johnson has written a response to my earlier attack of his “Keep SGA!” Facebook group.

I’ve been given some space by the gracious Mr. Lindsey to offer a rebuttal to his critique of my Facebook group. I’ll just start with the first point and work from there.

“Dead Wrong” about the Key?

I believe Noah Mink already cleared this up in the comments section of the original post. Every single person who actually spent their time working on this, Black Tie or SGA, will tell you that credit goes to both organizations. This is not really debatable. BTP helped with the past versions of the Key, and with helping SGA get the new Key set up, SGA brokered the deal with the administration that secures the future versions of the Key.

“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.”

I suppose it depends on how you define “challenged”. SGA helped get meetings with administrators, organized a phone and email campaign (Dr. Bennett got ~300 emails in just a few days), got administrators to promise to enforce no tailgating, and inspected the fields after every game they were used. Most of this was done in conjunction with club/intramural teams, but certain parts were pretty much all SGA, like the inspection of the fields. The effort wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far without SGA’s help.

“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 haven’t succeeded on these counts yet, correct. But we have been working on them for months. The bureaucratic nature of a University prevents everything from happening instantly. These efforts will be followed through on if SGA exists after the coming election. And people like Matt Suber and Jonathon Lee still deserve all the credit in the world for the months they put into these efforts. I could write 5 pages about all the hoops they’ve jumped through to try to push these efforts along.

“SGA let our Fall Break get cut. Fall Break got cut in half. SGA saved half of Fall Break. Thanks, guys.”

Realistically, it was the “one day for Fall Break/full week for Thanksgiving” compromise or nothing. Ask Katy Bowers for more info, it was the best deal we could get when teachers outnumber us drastically on University Council. Sarcastic whining is easy, but this was a success to save a day for Fall Break (and extend Thanksgiving Break).

“New rules (for the budget) 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!”

Don’t have any knowledge of the budgetary status of every program. You could be right, could be wrong. I can’t keep up with stuff like that; I’d have to ask Justin Caudill.

“It (election reform) apparently didn’t work that well, because students have NO CHOICE in their representation this year!”

Believe me; I’m incredibly disappointed no one is running. I think all of the informational meetings (which were VERY well attended) were a great addition, and we got good press coverage of them, so I can only wonder why only two parties formed and one dropped out. As a side note, what happened to Black Tie this year? Just asking because I assumed they would be running, but they aren’t.

“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?”

I’m in the process of finding out whether or not this is true. I believe that appointed position hours were increased, and that the enforcement of office hours was stricter this year. However, as I’m not 100% sure yet, I took this down in good faith. I’ll put it back up once I get confirmation. I agree with you that office hours could be structured better. They should be posted somewhere easy to find and perhaps be held somewhere other than the SGA office.

In conclusion, I think that SGA has accomplished a lot this year, and certainly should be voted into continued existence. I know many people here might disagree, but I feel we’ve done a job that’s at least decent (if not better than decent) by any fair standards. I don’t think student representation is “crumbling” I think it’s doing quite well. If there are any readers who’d like to ask me anything further, I’d be happy to talk, just shoot me a Facebook message.

Jeremiah Johnson