It’s official, Student Senate has turned into political Kabuki. At last Wednesday’s meeting, a discussion about Senator Nate Gulley’s non-existent professionalism, including his unsubstantiated claims of racism directed at various colleagues, devolved into spectacle. More than 50 protesters marched into the EMU Boardroom – some carrying placards – declaring their allegiance to Gulley and decrying what they viewed as widespread institutional racism within student government.
Before the meeting happened, Senate President Sara Hamilton was relieved of all her duties as a result of a grievance filed by Senator Erica Anderson, a Gulley supporter who was proudly sporting a “I Love My Cunt” T-shirt. The Constitution Court ruled that Hamilton had not distributed the Senate agenda on time on numerous occasions, thus making her partially derelict in her duties.
Why Con Court dismissed Hamilton of all her senatorial duties and not simply the ones pertaining directly to her position as Senate president is unclear to me. Why Erica Anderson went to Con Court instead of the Senate ombudsman is also unclear.
At the end of the meeting, Senators Karl Mourfy and Jacob Daniels both resigned their seats in protest.
The entire evening was a chaotic mess.
The situation smacked of the worse kind of petty politics – the kind in which underhanded personal attacks are used to undermine your opponent’s credibility. Declaring a person to be a racist will always elicit an unfavorable response, as the accused must exert energy defending himself.
According to one apocryphal story, when Lyndon Johnson was running for Congress he told his staffers to spread a rumor about his opponent being a “pig fucker.” Johnson’s campaign manager initially balked at the idea. “You know he doesn’t do that,” said the campaign manager.
“I know that, but I want to make him deny it.”
True or not, the story illustrates how politically and personally damaging unsubstantiated claims can be.
The protesters who filled the boardroom attempted to use a number of examples to illustrate that the ASUO is racist, sexist, ableist, among other words ending in the suffix “ist” – everything from the senators passing notes and snickering during presentations to people laughing at a student’s broken English. These instances are less indicative of a surreptitious level of racism and more indicative of a monumental amount of immaturity.
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View video from the Senate Meeting
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The ASUO is about as inclusive an organization as you are likely to find. But its primary problem is that it lacks a level of cordial respect. Perhaps the campus needs to discuss issues concerning racism – it does, after all, still exist. But last Wednesday’s Senate meeting was intended to call every person on Senate a racist, which is the least constructive thing you can do. If a Senator happened to be a person of color, then they were accused of “not knowing where they come from.”
How can you possibly defend yourself against such an insulting statement? Furthermore, what, precisely, constitutes racism? I realize that it is defined as “racial prejudice plus power,” but is questioning the Multicultural Center’s budget an act of racism? Hardly. Is attempting to keep the incidental fee at a reasonable level racist? Absolutely not.
In a cynical political move, Gulley side-stepped legitimate allegations concerning his character by making his own specious claims. Still, Gulley remains unethical, irresponsible and immature. He typifies everything that is bad about the ASUO, and he brings out the worst in his colleagues.
It is important to be critical of our student government because these are our future leaders; Karl Rove did not simply materialize, and Johnson was not the last politician to resort to irresponsible name calling. If we care about accountability and ethics, then we need to have an intelligent discussion concerning issues, not political theater.
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