Lofty goals
It's surprising and flattering that they would even try.
Despite all the criticism Central Michigan Life sometimes levels at the Student Government Association, each ticket for president of SGA came for an interview with our editorial board.
In the last five years, our pages have endorsed three tickets - all losers.
So it's a wonder SGA presidential hopefuls Paul Pridgeon and Andrew Verburg even showed up to get grilled by our staff.
Each presidential candidate had essentially the same plan and sold it with the same conviction.
The differences are slight, echoing the familiar experience versus change argument.
Pridgeon and his vice-presidential candidate Brad Sjoquist are the SGA Senate and House leaders, respectively. Verburg and his vice-presidential candidate Jamelle Dooley are "committed to change" and their soon-to-be Web site has "change" in the title - they must offer concrete plans for the changes they seek.
Here are the issues both tickets presented: More academic advising, lowering the cost of an education, holding down textbook costs and bringing campus together. In other words, boilerplate issues every SGA presidential ticket during the last five years has also mentioned and mostly failed at.
We have no doubt both tickets will fail miserably to meet their lofty goals, so who can get more done?
We were very impressed by Verburg's organizing experience at Grand Rapids Community College and appreciate his early recognition that SGA must begin fighting CMU administrators on student fees in the absence of the Promise.
Verburg's push for increasing Greek funding concerned us. He advocated an additional $3,000 to fund Greek programs and acknowledged that other groups would lose that $3,000 in funding, yet had no idea which groups.
An SGA president should never use his or her position to assist one group of students over another, especially when it is a personal conflict of interest (Verburg is a proud Greek himself).
Pridgeon outlined how he would get more students active in SGA with specific ideas, an issue Verburg touched on as well. The difference between the two was simply that Pridgeon had detailed solutions, while his opponent outlined the problem in broad strokes.
The impression left is that both see the exact same faults within SGA, but Pridgeon had a plan while Verburg had a sketch.
We endorse Pridgeon and Sjoquist, but urge them to adopt Verburg's push to fight student fees, something they did not address during our meeting.
