Failure to Communicate: Re-elections can't come early enough for SGA

In February of 2007 when the UNCG Student Government Association was placed on probation, it was because the SGA failed to give the university 12 hours notice before holding an event on campus. It was a small rule broken, essentially a technicality.

In March of 2008 our SGA was placed on probation again, for what we again can essentially call a technicality. The SGA recently lost its affiliation with the university for about a week and a half when SGA President John Bryant was supposed to submit some paperwork, but apparently did not. Its current probationary status is the result of Bryant's error.

These errors might seem small when taken at face value, but they reflect a huge failure of our SGA to fulfill one of its major purposes. To many students, SGA is known mostly as the governing body they have to deal with in order for their student group to gain and maintain affiliation with the university or receive any of the funds allotted to student groups. Without filling out the correct forms and taking the technical, SGA-approved steps toward affiliation, you're not getting a dime.

I know plenty of people who have failed at this task, frustrated, because they simply forgot a form or turned something in too late. But them's the breaks. You don't go through the motions, you don't get your moolah.

So, the mere fact that these violations happened in the governing body charged with deciding if all other student groups can receive or maintain affiliation with the university begs the question, why are people who can't follow the rules in charge of enforcing the rules?

It seems simple enough to expect that the people at the highest levels of student command in our university, the people expected to be most familiar with the policies they deal with on a constant basis, actually follow those policies.

It also brings up another, possibly more important, question. Why does the SGA get second chances when other student groups committing the same error would simply lose their affiliation and funding? What's unfair about expecting the rules to be, well, fair? It is important that we have an SGA. That our SGA needs to exist is not in question, especially when the other option is an administration-appointed council. But we need not allow those seats of power to be filled by people consistently proving themselves incapable of the most basic tasks of their jobs, not the least of which being another failed election, which is becoming something of an annual event for the SGA. It's not really the type of behavior you want from the people who have stepped up to complete these tasks and are being paid to do so.

Not only does the SGA owe better conduct to the student body as an agreement of being elected, they owe it to UNCG as a literal debt for their pay. Twenty-seven positions in the SGA are paid positions, totaling an annual payroll of just over $29,000. In a normal situation, and I can tell you this from personal experience, if you don't do your job then you get fired. Think of what might happen if The Carolinian took the thousands of dollars allocated to us by the University Media Board for printing costs and pocketed it without putting out a newspaper? Your campus newspaper would be quickly put under new management, that's what.

It wouldn't be fair to end without pointing out that when I'm saying "SGA," I don't mean every single student that is a member of our campus government. It's just common sense that not every person in the organization deserves the criticism directed at the actions of a few. As I've pointed out, the affiliation problem lands at the feet of John Bryant. That's the risk of being in charge. The brunt of the fault in needing to re-do an entire election can be aimed at Mekia Taylor, chair of the Elections and Publicity Committee, and the rest of her committee. That is what they're responsible for, unless the committee name and bylaws have misled me.

Unfortunately for the students of UNCG and the other members of the SGA, these are the ones in charge. Their errors speak loudly to the students of UNCG, but even louder would be the SGA as a whole failing to take the necessary steps to correct those errors and ensure they not happen again. There's absolutely no reason to expect that those who fouled it up the first time will somehow get it right the second time, especially not when those outside of SGA aren't given the same second chance.