“I’m very glad to have a group that, regardless of personal opinion, is committed to transparency and student representation.”
Associated Student Body Vice President and President of the ASB Senate Morgan Gregory said those words of the ASB Senate after the group’s April 16 meeting last semester. Transparency and fair student representation, according to ASB President Greg Alston, have been the current ASB administration’s top goals since they were elected in March.
At The Daily Mississippian, our top goal is to hold our student government accountable in order to ensure that our most important asset, you, the students at The University of Mississippi, are represented fairly and justly.
We feel that, for the first time under the new administration, the ASB Senate – and as a result, the ASB as an organization – has failed to meet at least one of its top goals.
The current administration knew that the male homecoming title, previously called “Colonel Reb,” was much more than a title — it was the last little bit of a mascot’s life that traditionalist students, alumni and fans could hold onto. However, the current ASB administration’s hands were clean — on March 25, the last of Colonel Reb died on the previous ASB administration’s last-minute decision, not theirs. But the newly-elected administration still had to deal with the mess when they took office March 27.
In a DM staff editorial that was published on April 5, the majority of last year’s editorial staff commended the Judicial Council’s decision that the title “Colonel Reb” was unconstitutional. We did not agree with the process in which it was handled and the precedent that was set forth by the ASB’s decision, as the ASB Judicial Council’s five unelected members made that decision without getting proper input from the student body it represents.
We condemn the idea that a small group of students, whether it is five Judicial Council members or 52 senators, can make a decision of this magnitude for an entire student body. ASB senators are elected by the student body to represent that student body fairly, and we feel that has not been done.
When the ASB Senate was tasked with determining a new name for the male homecoming personality election title, every ASB senator had the purest of intentions. They knew that a tall task had fallen in their laps, especially after the chaos and backlash the previous ASB administration had left them with.
After initial deliberation at the ASB Senate meeting on April 16, the senators made the right decision: get more student input before making a decision that could enrage the majority of their constituents even more. However, there was no time for a formal student poll, according to ASB Attorney General Rob Pillow, so the senators made another decision: poll the student body informally.
A poll, created on SurveyMonkey.com by ASB Graduate Senator Jennifer Campbell, was distributed to students by the ASB Senate in an unorganized way. Only 1,035 students voted in the poll that listed Mr. Magnolia, Mr. Rebel, Mr. Hotty Toddy, Mr. Ole Miss and a write-in vote. Fifty to 60 percent* of that 1,035 wrote in “Colonel Reb,” which cannot possibly be an option because, according to the previous ASB Judicial Council’s decision, that title is unconstitutional. The second-highest vote total was for Mr. Ole Miss, which only received about 20 percent* of the vote.
The poll results confused the senators. At their next and final senate meeting of the semester on April 30, they debated for over three hours. The lingering argument during that meeting was whether they could accurately represent their constituents by voting for the title “Mr. Ole Miss.” The senators were stumped, and they made the decision to wait until the following fall semester when there could be more student input and better due process.
This was a decent idea, but some senators had the foresight to realize that there would not be enough time for that when the fall semester began. Despite multiple comments from multiple senators about potential problems with postponing a decision, the majority of the senators voted to kill the “Mr. Ole Miss” bill and readdress the issue in the fall.
The DM first learned about tomorrow’s vote on Aug. 20 — exactly one week before the vote will take place — through an off-the-record source. We feel that this tainted one of the two goals of the ASB administration: transparency. If we had not been tipped off by that source, we likely would not have known about the vote until it was being debated Tuesday night, and many of you likely would not have known about it until after it was completed.
DM staff members questioned Gregory last Thursday about what the ASB Senate had done over the summer to obtain additional student input.
“A lot of our preparation has been talking to people individually, talking to organizations, telling senators to reach out to people,” Gregory said. “We want to know as many opinions as we can. We want to know what people are thinking so that those thoughts can be brought to the floor so (the students) can be accurately represented.”
We sincerely hope that the ASB senators did what Gregory said they did, but that is not quite good enough for us.
We believe that the ASB Senate should have done a better job of spreading the word publicly, not just privately as Gregory inferred. The ASB Senate Twitter account has remained dormant since July 7. Additionally, no tweets, Facebook posts or website posts from the ASB Senate or ASB have even hinted at the fact that a Senate vote will occur tomorrow.
The list of Senators is buried four pages deep in the ASB website and, to our knowledge, has never been advertised to the public regarding tomorrow’s vote. That list, as mentioned in the article on the front page of today’s DM, only has links to 31 of 52 senators’ email addresses. Gregory’s photo is the only one posted on the website.
We took the time to list every ASB senator, the groups they represent and their email addresses on the next page of this issue of The DM. We did this not because the ASB asked us to, but because we think you are being cheated by not having this information.
We, the editorial staff of The DM, propose that an official student poll be drafted and released by the ASB. Furthermore, every student at Ole Miss should get the chance to cast their vote for a new title.
As a result of our proposal, fall student personality candidates might have one or two less weeks to campaign, but that would be the fault of the ASB Senate, which failed to do its job effectively. The Senate lost its chance to give personality election candidates time for planning and campaigning when they failed to seek the proper student input.
We urge each of you to reference the list that we have provided and contact your senators about this issue. This is the time to literally let your voice be heard. If the vote occurs tomorrow night as the ASB Senate says it will, the bickering, clashing and finger-pointing the campus experienced after the Judicial Council’s decision will return and would directly counter the ASB administration’s own remaining untainted goal: fair student representation.
*The ASB Senate never provided The DM with exact numbers. Instead, we estimated the percentages using a chart graph that the ASB Senate tweeted on the night of April 30.
Adam Ganucheau, Phil McCausland, Grant Beebe, Caty Cambron, Pete Porter, Hawley Martin, Thomas Graning, Sarah Parrish, David Collier, Natalie Moore, Ignacio Murillo, Tisha Coleman, Natalie Wood, Mallory Simerville, Emily Crawford, Casey Holliday, Kendyl Noon.
