Senate clueless on debate society

This is to the Student Senators who in November voted to revoke the charter of the Debate and Forensics Society and this past week voted to encourage the university to create a debate team. To you 25 Senators, this is what I have to say:

Where was your encouragement to the University to have a debate team when the officers of the former Debate and Forensics Society came to you for help at the beginning of the school year? Where was your encouragement to the University when we were having trouble recruiting new members because you had frozen our account? (I still miss that $21 I spent on stake signs and was never refunded. Remember hearing us tell you that?) Where was your encouragement to the university to have a debate team when we were having trouble finding an advisor and asked for help?

Did you help the Debate and Forensics Society when we asked for it? Did you unfreeze enough of our funds to pay for stake signs to announce meetings so we could get more people to join because you had issues with our membership level? No, you did not.

When we asked for your help you placed us under charter review. You gave us four weeks — just four weeks — to search the entire University for someone who would be our new advisor and to increase our membership to at least 12 members.

When we came back to you after those four weeks we had several candidates for our advisor that we were in the process of talking to, and we were having an interest meeting the following Tuesday, but already had eight members, most of whom were returning from the past year. This was not good enough for you. You claimed that because we had not yet held a meeting, those members weren’t really members.

Funny thing about charter review — when you’re under it, you’re technically not allowed to have meetings.

Over the next two weeks we increased our membership to at least 12 SMU students and found a new advisor. But two weeks later the Organizations Committee voted to recommend that Student Senate revoke our charter. During the debate in Senate over whether or not to revoke our charter, Senators brought up such points as “We don’t like their leadership,” and “The officers elected themselves,” the second of which is not true. But these points (among others, like we took too long to meet the stipulations given by the Organizations Committee) were presented by Senators as reasons to vote to take away our charter.

Senate can’t pick who gets to lead every organization, even if they have a personal problem with the leaders. I guess if they don’t like the people in your organization, they will do whatever they can to take away your charter, and then the following semester they will encourage the University to create the same type of organization. At least that’s what it looks and feels like.