Thursday, February 24, 2005

Student finance committee resigns en masse 

It's odd that this appears in an opinion column and not in a regular news story in the University Chronicle.

On Feb. 17, 2005 the entire Finance Committee resigned. The letter of resignation stated student government's executive board actions created an "extenuating hostile environment," and also stated "the executive board's objectives and our goals do not align." Some of these frustrations stemmed from "...consistent and open engagement in bias representation of students organizations."

SFC felt its "ethical and business principles" were compromised. SFC saw only two options; follow the politics of being made "puppets" of student government by consistently "chastising" organizations the executive members disliked, or resign. The resignation letter also voiced other concerns relating to "meddling in our daily activities, threatening to impeach based on unfounded claims and... contempt toward finance members." The committee's resignation letter quoted the president of student government, having said "we hired you and you must do what we say," in so doing "violating SFC policies, and unfairly representing students."


As I understand the student handbook at SCSU, any decision by the student finance committee has to be approved by 2/3 vote of student government, so in some sense there is a veto of SFC available to student government anyway. But this, in light of student government's continued radicalism on issues like Support the Court, would seem to indicate that student government is not only practicing Soviet ideology but also Soviet political methods. If I wrote this opinion piece, I'd worry about late-night visitors.
At a meeting SFC discussed the future of this leadership noting "Student Government's attempt to put their hands on everything will simply lead to their downfall and a misrepresentative legacy." As one SCSU administrator noted, "leadership fails when it tries to micromanage or put it's hands on everything for the sake of power."

I wonder why the student newspaper, uniquely positioned to get at this story, hasn't investigated and reported more on this development?

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