Taken Aback
Take Back Campus was clearly just a thinly-veiled front for next year’s potential Executive candidates, shamelessly backed by the current ASUO Executive. Did anyone else think it was ridiculous for Take Back Campus to be substitutable for a Programs Council Meeting (that all programs MUST attend)?
It’s obvious that the conspirators organizers of Take Back Campus are not going to be able to accomplish most of the issues they railed against (which were as far and between as the Wrestling team cut, a police force on campus, and the Holy Cow). The only possible reason, then, for them to address ALL those hot topic issues is that they were trying to get as wide of a range of potential VOTERS in the same place, and for those VOTERS to see the faces of the potential Executives as candidates that will ‘take action’ somehow.
The quotes in the ODE article about Take Back Campus further illustrate this. “The first step you can take is voting in ASUO elections” said Andrew Jenson, Elections Outreach Coordinator. Oh, look! It JUST SO HAPPENS that elections are JUST AROUND THE CORNER! How convenient.
One of the organizers of the event, Jesse Hough, said in an earlier ODE article that Take Back Campus had no correlation with upcoming elections, and that “when you’re getting people to be vocal and you’re getting people to vote it’s kind of the same realm, but there’s really no connection between the two things.”
I say BULLSHIT.
If there isn’t any connection to elections, why didn’t they do this before? The Holy Cow issue has been going on for several months now. The Arena project has as well. People have been pushing for ES Departmentalization for YEARS. Why now?
P.S. Before anyone can call me out on this, YES, I am running for Senate, so YES, I am paying attention more to elections and other people that are preparing to run. But it doesn’t mean that Take Back Campus isn’t bullshit.
I, for one, am outraged that student groups who attended Take Back Campus were allowed to skip out on one PCM meeting. Granted, those PCM meetings are boring as hell and I wouldn’t wish them on anyone, but the executive branch granting groups a free pass to skip a PCM meeting to listen to the Executive’s politics is a blatant abuse of power by the executive.
Yup, sounds about right. It’s called the scattershot school of politics… name as many bad things as possible and say you’re against them. The fact that it was organized within Suite 4 shows how skeezy, political and careerist the current administration is. The fact that it was advertised as a substitute for PCM meetings should be grounds for some kind of grievance, except that PCM is already a tool of the fee-fed ASUO political machine (a mandatory monthly seminar on how to get more money even if you don’t need it).
All of this illustrates exactly why someone needs to start an official ASUO “opposition party” that won’t go away after the election. Students can ignore the fact that the ASUO is a defacto one-party system as long as their anger is directed at the administration/anybody else. Meanwhile the ruling party shuffles in some new faces with the same promises (we’re taking back campus!) and the fee goes up and nothing gets done. But no, college students should be focused on issues that they can make a difference on… like Global Warming and Environmental Racism and eliminating every last vestige of inequality from life. Oh children, children, children…