TO THE EDITOR:
When Eastern Carolina University senior Ashley Yopp and I were given the opportunity to lead the UNC-system Association of Student Governments in April 2008 — after winning by a one-vote margin against a UNC-ECU ticket, in what remains the single longest election in the association’s 41-year history — it was widely acknowledged among the delegates that ASG’s problem was having too much of the group’s power concentrated in its presidency. Without a once-in-a-generation type of student filling that role, the organization would inevitably fail from inadequate leadership.
So at the first meeting of the 2008-09 academic year, we burned everything to the ground and started over. We adopted a new constitution that flattened the organization and moved power back into the hands of the delegates themselves, cut the president’s stipend by 30 percent, scrapped entire positions, eliminated the perks received by the executive officers and made it possible for delegates to bypass me entirely if they ever chose to do so. I also fired three officers in the first three months of my term when those officers weren’t performing at the level expected of a representative body.
A flattened and transparent structure, and the innovation by the delegates that structure spurred, is why UNC ASG got more done from 2008 to 2010 than at any time before or since. That time also happened to include UNC Student Body President Jasmin Jones being named our 2009-10 delegate of the year for her work and that of the UNC delegation.
But the problem with a structure designed to empower delegates is having delegates willing to wield it. My alma mater soon decided ASG wasn’t worth attending if N.C. State University wasn’t running the show as it had for seven of the previous 10 years. Its delegation stopped attending, UNC’s delegation soon followed suit and barely a year went by before the familiar carping-from-a-distance picked up — and UNC’s Student Congress finally got its years-long wish to have a referendum on Carolina’s UNC ASG membership.
That referendum failed decisively, of course, yet ASG’s leadership was sufficiently scared that the group foolishly embraced more “reform”: shifting power back into the presidency and executive branch, where students are now (unsurprisingly) back at square one.
UNC ASG will never function if every year it fights a fresh battle just to decide whether or not it should continue to exist. But the aspiring politicians who populate the student governments at UNC and NCSU seem to think one can simply enact paper reforms to fix things or simply create some new organization to fix things, all without actually putting in any real work to fix things.
Having lost two referendums in two years now, with a whopping 3.2 percent of the student body voting to leave UNC ASG this time around, it’s a foregone conclusion that Student Congress will try yet again to get the results it wants at some point in the not-distant future. Let’s just hope at some point we also end up with less “reform” and more work, both from UNC ASG leadership and also the campus officials complaining about that leadership.
After all, everything you pay to UNC ASG in your four years at Carolina is dwarfed by what you pay to Student Congress in one semester alone: are you getting an adequate return on that investment?
