I’m editor for CRDaily. I don’t speak for anyone on this campus except for myself. I am an average student. What if I were Student Body President?As SBP I would represent the student body (Section 3 Park H). If I wrote an editorial and signed it with my title as SBP, I would be speaking as the main representative of 29,136 of my fellow students.

On April 17, Student Body President Will Leimenstoll wrote a letter to the Editor in the Daily Tar Heel where he urged the student body to vote against Amendment One.  Personally, I am against the Amendment, but this isn’t about the Amendment. This is about the Student Body President, who represents 29,136 students.

As Student Body President, you speak for the student body. When you write a letter to the editor imploring students to vote in a certain manner on an issue, you disregard the opinions of students you claim to represent. There are students on this campus who are in favor of Amendment One, and this means that you must respect that. It is easy to claim that this is a personal belief, and that would have been fine, it if had been signed without the title “Student Body President.”

The same applies for appearing on campaign websites. It’s fine to agree with a politician on an issue, but to appear as the spokesman for the Obama campaign on student loans, means that as Student Body President, the representative of the student body, you have successfully ignored the political views of a strong minority of students.

When I met with Will Leimenstoll, he informed me that he wanted to make sure that all voices were being heard on campus, even conservatives. I find that hard to believe now. His Executive Board, full of Young Democrats and Moreheads, is obviously out of touch with any student who holds differing opinions. He needs to stop pretending to listen to those that disagree with his beliefs, and actually do so.

I sincerely hope that President Leimenstoll does not abuse his position as Student Body President further by urging us to vote for President Obama or Walter Dalton for Governor. I hope that he realizes that once he puts his title on anything that he says, he speaks for 29,136 students, not just himself. It’s a tough lesson, but it’s time to learn it.

But I understand. As a former member of an organization which does nothing but line its officers’ pockets, burnish their résumés for law school, and use student money to fund trips around the state, there is no defense.

But if you are interested, here is the article mentioned by Mr. Clevinger in his letter, written by former ASG President T. Greg Doucette.

1. Mario Benavente
2. Mary Cooper
3. Rick Ingram

and possibly:

4. Cierra Hinton

It’ll be interesting to see how all this plays out. A few folks in Student Congress want to raise the signature threshold for SBP candidates from the current 1,000 to 1,500 possibly even 1,700, so it’ll be interesting to see if any candidates fall short- if it’s only the three or four mentioned above, I doubt it’ll have much impact.

But if one or two more come out of the woodwork, someone’s not going to make it.

UPDATE: Confirmation that Hinton is NOT in the running.

FURTHER UPDATE: Hinton herself confirmed that she is running.

Student elections were self-funded until Fall of 2002 when they became funded by student fee money. The two main arguments in favor of the current arrangement are seemingly convincing, however invalid: self-funding denies poor students the opportunity to run for office; and not having a cap would allow the wealthy students to “buy” the election.

I doubt self-funding would actually deny students the ability to run based on their socioeconomic status. And if a wealthy student wants to be a sad tool and “buy” a student body election, they deserve to have this as their life’s only victory. Somehow, this system worked fine up until 2002. And students can still fundraise to make up the difference which is where things get interesting, because a common argument I’ve heard against fundraising has been that students wouldn’t actually donate money to campaigns because they don’t care enough to do so.

Implicit within that argument, however, one is saying that since students don’t care enough about student government to voluntarily fund elections, student government should force them against their will to do so. Who’s democratic now?

At the end of the day, is anyone really convinced by a-frames or sheets of paper? No. Students are convinced by one-on-one interaction with the candidates and the arguments candidates make at any of the forums students attend. Also crucial is the DTH endorsement. So even if a student didn’t fundraise on parity with other campaigns, this would not impair their ability to win using any of the usual means candidates reach the students.

So complete, private funding with no cap would be ideal, but given the realities of the situation, the most likely scenario where student fee funding is cut would be to have a cap put in place on private money to be spent. Opponents would argue a cap is unenforceable, but the same argument could be made against the current cap. What stops campaigns from just not turning receipts of purchase in? Theoretically, unless someone turns a campaign in, candidates could spend way over $400 and the BOE would be none the wiser. The cap is flawed either way. But the BOE would still have the same punitive tools in its hands to punish campaigns that went over the cap when private money is used, even up to disqualifying a candidate for exceeding the amount.

Stud cong needs to do the right thing and actually return the choice to students as to which campaigns they would fund. Who knows, maybe campaigns would have so little money they won’t annoy us in the pit with fliers or cause us to trip over their silly a-frames. Wouldn’t that be nice…

The Renewable Energy Fee works in a similar fashion: each year, we vote whether or not to continue levying the $4 fee to improve the sustainability of our university. This is completely fair because it doesn’t mean we pay the price for decisions made by previous students in a different historical context. For example, in years past, students have consistently voted to increase the Student Activities Fee. But now we’re in a rough economic environment, and people want to be as frugal as possible. Do you really think these students would choose to fund more and diverse content provided by student organizations? Or should they take that money and put it to what they believe to be is a better use? I think the latter. Unfortunately, we do not have a choice in the matter, and students’ wishes at the moment are ignored.

The basic schematic for how this would work would be add a four-year sunset clause to each new student fee levied and each student fee increase, which means, every four years, that fee or increase would expire unless re-approved by a majority of students. Stud gov types would complain that this would mean that the amount of money available to student groups would fluctuate or even decrease (egads!), to which I respond, so what. We’re supposed to be catering to students, not the special interests embedded in Student Congress and on the Finance Committee. So if students vote to allow a fee or increase to expire, that means they’d prefer to spend that money in the way they see fit. If only student government saw it that way…

However, his attacks on the Review were completely unfounded. He refers to the magazine as being “known as much for its factual errors and limited readership as any incisive analysis.”  Of course, he is rather short on the details (as these gross generalizations normally are). But let’s look at the article he’s referring to “Waste, Bureaucracy, and the ASG” which I authored for the September 2009 issue. I’ve spoken with several ASG members and sympathizers about the article, but so far, none have contested the facts behind my argument. They only quibble over why the ASG should exist. Check the numbers for yourself. For Fiscal Year 2009, these were the budget outlays, categorized using Forbes‘s “Charitable Commitment” methodology:

Ironically, right after damning the Review for being factually inaccurate, he says, “I stand by my comments in that particular column.” So what exactly is the issue?

Only a few paragraphs down, he sounds off again: “Calling the low-circulating, error-filled, poorly-edited, monthly-published Carolina Review a ‘major student publication’ is laughably ridiculous on its own.”  Again, accusations without foundation. Where are all these errors he refers to? So tiresome.

My suspicion is the ASG folks realize they can’t win the argument based on its merits. When UNC sends about $28,000 a year to the ASG and realizes no benefits, we should pull out and stop paying the fee. This is commonsensical to most people. But between a combination of salary and self-importance, the ASG members of UNC’s Student Congress didn’t let this question be put to the students and will not allow serious discussion of the viability of an organization like the ASG to take place without resorting to ad hominem attacks. Because that’s all they’ve got.

PS I thought it was hilarious he referred to Our Dear Leader Nash Keune’s campaign for SBP as an example of why UNC SBPs have changed their mind on the ASG (he had a “withdraw from the ASG” plank in his platform). Nash “came in a distant 4th place in the campus’s election last month with a whopping 12% of the vote.” Never mind that this meant he beat two other candidates (one of whom was a huge ASG sycophant), his campaign WAS A JOKE if it wasn’t obvious at the time. I don’t think students went to the polls and determined their selection based in the candidates’ ASG platform (outside of those students who pull a salary from the ASG, then that makes sense).

After all, if men are in congress disproportionate to their numbers, maybe other groups are represented disproportionately as well? Would this mean the campus election system is rigged or stacked in some way so as to prevent underrepresented groups from being elected to office?

Fortunately, every congressperson’s major is available by looking at the student congress website. Here’s the breakdown of all 25 undergraduate seats in student congress, according to the directory. The total number will add up to more than 25 due to double majoring:

The data appears to show that congress is not representative of the student body because it is dominated by Political Science, Economics and Peace, War & Defense majors. In fact, in this school full of pre-med students we have only 3 science majors out of 25 congress people.

Now, is the failure of congress to, in the words of the DTH, “fail to demographically or ideologically represent the student body” in this manner the fault of “the way members are elected and the way individuals seek seats make the organization”?

Or is it simply that some people are more likely to want to be on congress than others? Could it be, as many of you are probably screaming right now, that people in politics-related majors (Poli Sci, PWAD, Public Policy, Econ, etc) are more likely to want to be part of a political body? Congress races are rarely competitive. In fact, congress has trouble getting enough people to fill its seats. Almost anyone who wants to be on congress can be.

So if almost everyone who wants to be on congress can be, and no one is stopping anyone from running, and some types of people are more likely to want to be on congress than others, then what is the problem when certain groups of people want to run for congress at lesser rates than others? It can’t be a problem with the system.

If congress doesn’t “demographically or ideologically represent the student body”, what if the student body just doesn’t want to be demographically represented? There are few obstacles to being in student congress, so I must conclude that demographic disproportions are due to people who don’t want to run. Are we going to force people to be in congress who don’t want to be there?

What is the point of all this? So long as the election process is fair and open, there is no reason to worry about disproportionate demographics of any type. So long as there is equality of opportunity, the rest is up to the candidates and the voters. Complaining about demographics when there is equality of opportunity is simply nonsense.

“Leaders say the way members are elected and the way individuals seek seats make the organization fail to demographically or ideologically represent the student body.”

Hum… “the way members are elected” is failing us. Let’s ponder this for a second. The campus is split up into districts based on geography: south campus, mid-campus, north campus, etc… Students electing their own representatives somehow fails to be representative demographically or ideologically? Apparently, they’re claiming the districts are gerrymandered to return more conservative, male representatives than otherwise would be. How is this possible? At a school that’s overwhelmingly liberal and over 3:2 female to male, I’m not sure this is even possible.

The “way individuals seek seats” is also a trouble spot. Yes, attending a meeting, collecting twenty signatures, and putting up posters to garner votes is really the cause of a lack of representation. Holding elections? Man, so biased in favor of conservative males.

So really, the underlying claim is that democracy is failing us. Which is absolutely absurd.

Now, let’s consider the reason why they think democracy is not truly representative: because there aren’t enough women in Congress. No reason is given as to how this possibly affects Congress negatively. As I tried to point out in the article, the business that Congress conducts doesn’t have a male versus female perspective.

When Bounce magazine approaches Congress requesting money for the eight issues they publish a year, there isn’t a male-female divide on how much money to provide. If the event or item is vital to the mission of the organization, Student Congress must appropriate funds to them. The business of Student Congress is fairly objective. It’s not as if the “half-plus-one” rule for funding publications is a male construction and the addition of more females would alter that. Or is that really what the DTH is arguing?

That would be highly ironic considering the fact that, for the past few decades, extremist feminists have been trying to whitewash the fact that there are differences in the sexes, so apparently the DTH is allowing that fact. But, still, left unsaid is what differences would actually be…