It is a rare occurrence that The Daily Campus chooses to hold a special session of the editorial board. It is even less common that we would choose to publish our editorial on an irregular day. This is one of those occasions.

Today, The Daily Campus is joining 10 other major college newspapers from all over the state in encouraging Rick Perry to accept the invitation to debate Bill White on the University of Texas’s campus on Oct. 19.

To date, Perry has refused several invitations to debate Bill White. Perry’s office says that this is due to the fact that Bill White has not released his tax returns from the time he spent as deputy secretary of energy under President Clinton and as chairman of the Texas Democratic Party.

While we feel that this request for transparency is a worthy one, we also feel that this is not a substantial enough reason for the Perry campaign to deny the citizens of Texas what would be a valuable source of information. Their reasoning is inherently political and not based on public policy, and it is not what the citizens of Texas deserve out of this increasingly nasty campaign.

In Perry’s 25 years in elected office he has never been the loser. He has a reputation for fighting hard and running seamless campaigns. Bill White has been fighting hard this time around as well, and this campaign is quickly descending into attack ads, shifty politicking and lists of unanswered questions. It is time to see these hard-edged politicians discuss their differences in a public forum.

Public debates allow citizens to see what the candidates are like in a pressure-filled situation where they are forced to think on their feet and react instantaneously. This is an important test in determining their readiness to take office. It also mandates that candidates give concrete answers to difficult questions that they have been reluctant to speak out on while they are in campaign mode. Further, debates in a public forum allow people to literally compare the two candidates side-by-side, answer for answer. These three things are essential to making an educated decision as a voter.

We should be particularly passionate about this as college students. Collectively, there are more than 511,000 eligible college age voters in Texas. Together, we represent a large portion of the voting pool who are equally as affected by this campaign as our parents, our bosses and our professors. We would be remiss not to take action in this circumstance.

We, just as much as those stated above, will be affected by the elected governor’s decisions on immigration, health care, social services, public transportation, the environment and higher education, just to name a few. It is time for this spiteful campaign to take a turn for the better and culminate in a head-to-head debate.

Thus, The Daily Campus emphatically calls upon the Perry campaign to take down their barriers and agree to debate Bill White on Oct. 19. Should they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to lose.