One of the Student Union’s principal roles at Boston University is to provide a democratic forum for undergraduate concerns. This supposed ambition seems to have been thwarted by yet another Executive Board unwilling to recognize its faults or its democratic purpose. The indifferent attitude of the E-board regarding this year’s botched Senate election procedures suggests its aversion to the ideology of truth it so loves to tout. The election’s ambiguous results have consequently fashioned a Senate of uncertain validity, which the E-board has rallied to support.
As a member of last year’s Student Union Senate, I witnessed the eventual domination of Union affairs by an overly zealous Executive Board that led to the invalidation of the Senate as a functioning body. Certain E-board members’ responses to the flagrant mishandling of this year’s elections suggest that they are willing to nullify the Senate yet again.
Because SUEC was oblivious to its inability to successfully plan Senate elections four months in advance, it chose to adhere to, rather than extend, the time constraint on proper election proceedings. SUEC Chairwoman Jeanette Jankiewicz’s belief that “[t]here needed to be a Senate” is incomplete. There needs to be a functioning Senate comprised of duly elected members, voted to office by constituents not faced with a constraint on their democratic right to representation. What is the point of having elections if they are going to be bungled by a dictatorial Executive Board and its committees? It seems that to the Executive Board that ran on the “True College Experience,” the right to be properly represented no longer counts as part of that experience.
The Executive Board is choosing to make a debacle of democracy. Such debauchery can be expected from a government running on the coattails of its arrogant predecessor. I laud former Tribune Lisa Franchini for resigning from an organization that no longer upholds the democratic ideals it is supposed to defend. No rational, democratically minded individual could morally align herself with an institution intent on bureaucracy and the perversion of democratic principles. It takes integrity to challenge the complacence of those impervious to what is just and true.