Over the last few weeks, a series of columns appeared in The Massachusetts Daily Collegian about reforming the election bylaws of the Student Government Association. I’d like to thank the authors for their tireless efforts to expose the flaws of present and former SGAs. I draw on my experiences as an SGA member and also as a University of Massachusetts student, when I say that this issue is one that keeps part of me awake at night, while the other part of me couldn’t care less.

I stumbled into SGA as a freshman. I was drawn to the prospect of becoming a senator and representing my fellow students, but had no idea how to win an election. The experience was both the worst and best of my life: knocking on the doors of people I didn’t know, finding a picture of myself that I didn’t think was hideous and plastering it everywhere tape can stick and begging for my new friends to vote for me. I couldn’t believe I won a seat that September. I was even more surprised, however, by the fact that some of my counterparts won their races with only 10 percent of the votes I had received.

So I became a senator along with people that didn’t care about campus issues or changing student experiences. These were people who spent the whole meeting on cell phones, with no idea what was going on, which, as columns in The Collegian addressed, leads many people to consider the senate – and SGA – to be a joke. During some meetings, nothing was done. Other meetings were quite meaningful, and I thought I’d stop caring about those unengaged senators. Instead, as I became more involved, I resented everyone that treated it as a joke. The more effort I put into it, the more I learned how powerful the SGA could be and should be, but wasn’t.

The SGA does not use its powers to the fullest, and there are several reasons it does not function as smoothly as you or I would like. First, the SGA bylaws are outdated. They’re written in legalese which is hard to understand. The SGA isn’t a homecoming committee; it’s an official governing body set up by the government of Massachusetts by order of the Wellman Document, which was created by the Board of Trustees to codify student government at the UMass campuses.

The language makes it very hard to interpret, but progress was made in the last two years reviewing the bylaws in effort to fix some of these issues. This process of going through each provision will take years for the Administrative Affairs committee, but in the meantime, there is a judicial body to interpret them as issues arise.

Another point to note is that this difficult language not only affects elections, it also affects the senators in interpreting the extent of their power, and the committees in determining their responsibilities, including Registered Student Organization approvals, allocations and finances. There has been drastic reform in areas of the bylaws not pertaining to elections.

Second, not everyone elected to the Senate is effective, and those who could be better suited for the job may lose their elections. As aforementioned authors have pointed out, this is due in part to an ineffective apportionment of senate seats. In the quest to find a solution to this problem, which it has so boldly been implied that the SGA has not been already seeking, I’d like to tell you a little bit about SGA outside of Collegian columns.

Like many other student organizations, the real work happens outside of meetings. Last spring semester, as an unpaid senator, I spent about 10 hours a week outside of the required commitment, actively working for the SGA. I went to meetings with administrators, planned events, volunteered for other RSO’s and discussed election reform. Late Thursday evenings last year, a group of SGA members met informally to discuss a restructuring of the SGA and election reform.

We agreed that serious change around electoral districts and restructuring was necessary to engage more actively constituent votes and voices. Several solutions were put forward, everything from looking at how other large successful student governments were run to downsizing the SGA. We argued extensively over changing electoral districts to be drawn up by college, by class year and even having an at-large election. In the end, we didn’t reach a consensus.

The best part about SGA is the differences of opinion that are present in a room full of engaged students with completely different ideologies and backgrounds. Unlike other RSO’s and clubs, students don’t join SGA because they are seeking a comfortable, familiar environment in which to engage in an activity with similar people. Most SGA members have an individual goal in mind and are seeking an avenue in which to accomplish it. This, of course, results in a room full of often-conflicting goals and opinions. This can produce innovative solutions and collaborations but also sometimes results in stalemates.

Therefore, our group could only reach a consensus on merging the Southwest South and North electoral districts and having committee chairs appointed at the end of spring semester. No one could agree on an at-large solution because of the limited amount of input and our differing opinions. With only eight people caring about elections enough to discuss them, and about six equally plausible solutions, there was not enough support to make a significant change.

Therein lies my most important point: that students, faculty and administrators just do not care about making changes on our campus or the student power that already exists to effect change. I challenge the authors of the past few columns about SGA, those involved in our own SGA, those involved in student programming and especially those who were involved in this past spring’s election, to look at this as the main issue in the lack of effective student power. Consider the fact that it is easier for you or I to get elected to a student leadership position than it is to find out how we can best represent our constituents.

The reality of SGA membership is that those convoluted bylaws give us the right to make change on this campus, but unless we can find a way to figure out what constituents want or how to gain their support, effectual change cannot and will not happen.

Jennifer Raichel is a Collegian contributor and can be reached at [email protected].