To whom do standards of honesty and integrity apply, it not to our own?
Posted on September 10, 2007
James Madison University has worked for decades to build a strong reputation as an upstanding member of Virginia’s academic community. JMU’s commitment to excellence, honesty and integrity has caused students across the east coast, and indeed the country as a whole, to join the growing ranks of our flourishing university.
Last week those standards were violated and our reputation tarnished. The editors and news staff of The Breeze deserve much credit and admiration for bringing to our attention — in the most objective and informative fashion — the degree to which our current SGA president contradicted the very ideals which we profess to hold dearest to us.
I’ll be the first to admit the halfhearted attention I showed toward our most recent student body elections. Many students at JMU are at fault for allowing such elections to occur while applying minimal scrutiny to the candidates involved or the issues being discussed. This is a systemic problem that must be addressed by our faculty, our administrators and most importantly our student body, but for now it is a problem that must be addressed at a later date.
Despite the superficial stigma we may attach to our student government, they are our representatives among the academic community as a whole. It is true that the work these representatives do often goes without the appreciation it deserves. However, there are those within our student government who pursue such positions purely out of self-motivated desires to boost resumes and applications for graduate school. Our current president seems to be such an individual.
After serving one year in the position of SGA president, it seems as if Brandon Eickel decided to exploit the apathy of JMU students by putting forth a campaign based largely on name recognition, and a false image of original ideas. The degree to which Eickel stole his campaign ideas from the William and Mary students would be deemed plagiarism at a very minimum by even an elementary school English teacher.
The front page of the last edition of The Breeze shows better than any editorial can just how little regard Eickel had for the original ideas generated by his peers. He is right to say that there is much to be gained by conducting a productive dialogue with the student governments of other universities, yet he is blatantly wrong to assume that taking such ideas and professing them to be his own is an acceptable campaign practice at any level of government. If Eickel intends to pursue an office later in life perhaps he should take a crash course on basic campaign ethics.
As the student senate meets this week, I urge them to address this issue before considering whatever other pertinent business may be on the agenda. One week is too long to allow this deplorable debacle to cast an unnecessary cloud of despair upon a JMU community that proven its ability to uphold the standards it sets for itself has time and time again. Accountability should be the word of the week. As students at this university, the fate of our collective reputation should cause us to look with anxiety toward the outcome of the senate meeting and to ask nothing less of our representatives than we would ask of ourselves if in their position.
Allowing the highest representative of our student government to play us for fools in an annual election says something very negative about our student body as a whole. Allowing such an individual to continue to hold a position of authority would be an embarrassing situation that our institution would find extremely difficult to live down in the months and years ahead.
Patrick Callahan is a senior political science major.
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