Burning Down the House: Student Government will likely become single-body assembly in near future
No matter who wins the Student Government Association presidential election this week, the very structure of the organization will see major changes in the future.
Both presidential candidates, Grand Blanc junior Robert Brooks and Shelby Township senior Vincent Cavataio, and respective vice presidential candidates, Brighton sophomore Colleen McNeely and Jackson junior Bryant English, have proposed changing SGA into a unicameral body.
Currently the SGA is a bicameral system with a Senate and a House. The Senate comprises 23 members representing the various colleges on campus. The House consists of representatives from all registered student organizations receiving funding from the Student Budget Allocations Committee.
Present SGA President Brittany Mouzourakis said favor for a bicameral or unicameral system, both at Central Michigan University and statewide, has been recurring and is currently trending toward single-body assemblies.
The Garden City senior said CMU is just one of a shrinking number of bicameral student governments in Michigan.
“We’d just be following pace,” she said.
Mouzourakis said she and her vice president, Muskegon senior Dave Breed, had discussed making the change to a unicameral assembly this year, but it never came to fruition.
A major reason for the change, cited by Breed, Mouzourakis and both presidential tickets, is widespread apathy and lack of participation in the House. RSOs are required to participate to receive SBAC funding, which Mouzourakis said results in many students being at SGA meetings just because they have to be.
“When I speak to the House, sometimes I see people who genuinely don’t want to be there, and I think that’s a problem,” she said.
Wyoming senior Katie Birdsall, the SGA representative for the Student Enrichment Council, is opposed to the change, which she said would result in a loss of representation for RSOs on campus.
“I don’t really like that because the representation we get here is really important to us,” Birdsall said. “Even though I do other things while I’m here, I do take a lot of information back to my RSO and we use it. I think it’s a little naive to say (representatives) don’t participate.”
Breed said one compromise that was discussed was having “all-RSO meetings” once a month, to discuss what the SGA assembly has been doing, take questions and discussions and hear from speakers within the university.
“Administrators still want to talk to students … and SGA has traditionally been that place,” Breed said. “I hope if (the new president and vice president) do move to a unicameral system, they do put something like that in place, at least once a month.”
The Brooks/McNeely campaign is proposing an immediate change to the SGA at the beginning of next semester, creating a 35-member assembly with two representatives from each college and three graduate-student representatives. The Cavataio/English campaign wants to take the fall semester to create a transition team and determine the best way to become unicameral and how the assembly should be composed, and then make the change as soon as the spring semester.
Mouzourakis said to create the unicameral assembly, the House will first have to vote to dissolve itself. Then the vote will be taken to a student body referendum, where at least half the number of students who voted in this week’s SGA election must vote to dissolve the House.
Assistant Dean of Students Tony Voisin said SGA will continue to operate either way, and that getting enough students to vote for the referendum will be up to the SGA members.
“Presented properly … depending on how they put a spin on it, it could potentially be easy,” Voisin said.
