If you took this article for face value, you would think that the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences stole Student Senate seats from the Graduate delegation. This couldn’t be any further from accurate. If the author of the article had taken the time to tell the whole story, that would have been apparent. I will provide three pieces of information that dispute the misrepresentation from the Technician article. All of this information was provided in the debate in Student Senate, but for some reason the author of the article failed to include that. I know this information was given at the meeting because I personally delivered it. 

First off, the two seats that CALS gained were not taken from the Graduate delegation. For the last three years, the CALS delegation has been assigned too few seats and has been vastly underrepresented because of it.  CALS had four seats when it actually deserved more. The article failed to mention this very pertinent fact. The two seats that the Grad students lost were lost to other very active colleges in an attempt to assure that they did not lose seats: the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Sciences. The net change in seats was plus two for CALS and minus two for Grad, but that’s not how the reapportionment actually happened. 

Secondly, the Graduate students have two official representative bodies that they can represent themselves in — the Graduate Student Association and the Student Senate. Undergraduate students can only represent themselves in the Student Senate. Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable and fair that the graduate delegation size in the Senate is somewhat limited. Technically, if the delegation sizes were solely based on enrollment numbers, the graduated school delegation would have 18 seats, or 28 percent of the entire student senate. Not only is this unfair because of the special status of graduate student representation (having two places to have their voices heard) but this negatively impacts the diversity of the student senate. Also, the graduate delegation has not been able to fill all of their seats for 15 years. Allowing them to occupy over a quarter of the Student Senate and then leave those seats empty is unacceptable; they can’t even occupy 10. The current graduate delegation has made little to no effort to fill the currently empty seats. 

Finally, as I pointed out in the debate at Senate, the next session of student government will have a chance to raise the number of graduate students in the fall. This spring, the student body will be asked to vote on a referendum to raise the maximum number of seats in the Student Senate. If that is passed, the new limit will be 72 (it is currently 64). The next senate could very easily add more graduate seats if they deem it a good idea. 

This article is the most recent in a string of examples of poor journalism on the part of the Technician. Where I come from, folks are taught to do a job right, never halfway; I think it’s high time the Technician adopted that policy. Responsible journalism isn’t that hard — you just have to tell the whole story! I’m disgusted by the way this article attempts to portray CALS in such a negative fashion. Anyone in the CALS Student Senate delegation or the Apportionment Committee would have been happy to discuss this matter with the reporter and explain the fact, you just have to do your job and ask.