Posted on April 16, 2007
While incumbent SGA President Brandon Eickel won re-election two weeks ago by a significant margin, he should not carry his head too high.
Rather, it should be bent to the grindstone.
This election, with its write-in candidate’s success and its overwhelming support for the Green Fund initiative, reveals the signs of a newly-active campus — one where the SGA will not be able to sit back and handle “internal issues” for a year.
The results of the presidential election were never in doubt — the only credible opposition to Eickel was write-in candidate Ilk Ghavami, whose name, by definition, did not appear on the ballot. The greatest turnout in the election was for the Green Fund, but the fund’s supporters refused to endorse a candidate. This lack of endorsement resulted in a default endorsement for the only name on the ballot, as the fund’s supporters didn’t know they had another choice or that they should vote for him.
While the election was never truly in doubt, early in the week of the election it was clear his campaign was nervous — they hadn’t expected opposition and Ghavami was tireless in his campaign. Now that the election is safe in hand, however, that nervous energy should not dissipate. Rather, it should increase, until Eickel and the new SGA are scared into looking beyond their own face and making not just a “bold move,” but any move at all.
The SGA cannot afford to forget that only 2,899 people even voted in the presidential election this year and that of those, 807 intentionally wrote in the name of someone who wasn’t on the ballot and had no prior SGA experience, or that 110 voters were unwilling to elect either candidate and wrote in serious and silly alternatives.
Eickel’s mind should focus on those 32 percent of voters, as well as the 81 percent who backed the Green Fund. These percentages show that students are not only taking an active interest in what happens to their campus community, but that they are not willing to be satisfied with the status quo.
Business as usual needs to end. The SGA has passed its approval on many funding bills this past year, but can hardly brag any successful campus-building activities otherwise. The failure to secure purple and gold umbrellas for the picnic tables is dwarfed by the failure to successfully adopt a cause or start any new initiative. The most successful lobbying of the year — the Green Fund — started and ended outside the SGA, with the SGA merely waving the initiative on its way. The SGA tried to help the doomed Save Our Sports lobby, but the issue was tied up in the Board of Visitors, not the JMU administration, where the student representative to the BOV handled what the entire SGA could not.
This is the time for Eickel, using all the energy he put into running a snazzy unopposed campaign, to bring the SGA into the spotlight. It is the representative body of JMU students, not another social club, and has an inherent lobbying power with the administration that no other organization has. The Clean Energy Coalition built their momentum from the ground up, and with one listserv e-mail likely could have ended Eickel’s re-election hopes. The SGA should see that momentum as something to strive for and stop standing on the sidewalk to let the parade pass. The SGA is the parade, and now is the time for Eickel to lead it.
Most importantly, however, if the SGA never does take the initiative and act, the students must not be afraid to demand that it work on their behalf — while the SGA must step up, students also must take ownership of their representative body and demand that it represent them as more than passive, stationary and reactionary.
Alex Sirney is a senior anthropology and SMAD major.
