Representing students.
I love it when it’s “everyday students” who start railing against the ASUO, and not those who are watching their every move.
As an addendum to Rockne’s post below, here is the video of Amélie’s convocation speech (this is the whole convocation, her speech starts at 12:30). It is, as Rockne professed, embarrassing, and incredibly disrespectful to those who allowed her the microphone in the first place.
There is a certain level of responsibility that goes with the title of ASUO President. When you speak in public, you are speaking on behalf of more than yourself and the little office you work in. You are speaking on behalf of every incidental fee-paying student at the University of Oregon.
This poses a considerable problem when you are charged with making a speech to introduce a batch of around 4,000 brand new students to the University. As ASUO President, you have not made any headway in trying to deduce how students feel about any particular issue — mostly because students are not informed about most things happening on campus. It is for this reason that most convocation speeches (at least in the last few years) by ASUO Presidents have been largely apolitical, for fear of misrepresenting student views and being disrespectful to students in the process.
It becomes much harder when you decide to throw all of your responsibility out the window and flat out lie to those sitting before you. Amélie’s description of the riot on September 25th — that the Eugene Police Department started taking action because of one person throwing one beer bottle at one cop car — is completely absurd. The crowd was asked to disperse because they were blocking traffic and being loud, and when they did not disperse, actions were taken. And then, in a stunning display of putting the cart before the horse, she goes on to talk about arming the Department of Public Safety. What? DPS was nowhere near the incident, as it was not in their jurisdiction, and the proposals for DPS do not include arming them — at least not at the moment.
Her criticisms of President Lariviere’s New Partnership proposal were just as absurd, if not more. I’m not even going to address this one, because you can all read the white paper and see for yourself just how misinformed she is. I wonder if she’s even read it yet.
The worst part about all of this is the 4,000 freshmen who believed every single word she said. I have encountered those people, and no matter how many letters run in the Ol’ Dirty Emerald, there is going to be a large group of people who believe what she says and continue to do so throughout the year.
If any University undergraduates are reading this, please do your part to get informed about issues on campus. Especially when it comes to the ASUO, titles are meaningless. Just because a president says it, doesn’t mean it’s always true.
Then again, just because a managing editor says it, doesn’t mean it’s always true either.
