So the adage goes. And by “good things”, I refer not to the end of the school year, which too has been long awaited.

After I reached the “end” of the editorial proclaiming that the late senate Environment Committee is the number three “person” of the year, I realized that the debate itself regarding the committee has long been in need of its own end. For the past few months, since even before the senate’s Research & Recommendations Committee endorsed the innovative creation of the all-encompassing Student Concerns Committee, which effectively subsumed all the primary responsibilities of the Senate Environment Committee, the SMU Student Senate came under attack.

Specifically, I would like to address the demeaning language that is quite obviously intended to obfuscate the true intentions of the Student Senate. Unfortunately, and quite perplexingly, The Daily Campus employs such language for an article intended to laud the Environment Committee’s efforts. Why, then, do the words “disappointing,” “unacceptable,” “snide,” “disrespectful,” and “kill” occur in a work of acclaim? I must reason that The Daily Campus is yet again (albeit undeservedly) exploiting an opportunity to expound on how deplorable your elected student government apparently is.

Well, here’s to setting the record straight…again. After the members of the aforementioned R&R Committee labored more than 70 hours over tons of research into the operations of the student governments of our operational peer and benchmark universities, we came to the unanimous conclusion that it would be more effective for the Student Senate to deal with problems in a setting that allowed the many components of a student concern to be addressed simultaneously. Thus the committee conceived the Student Concerns Committee.

One of the primary reasons for my discontent with comments in The Daily Campus is that they claimed that, “Senate killed the committee.” Think of the senate as a corporation. Tell me, if a company decides that one division of its corporate decentralized organization (like our committee structure) is costing the company millions in potential profits, and the company decided to merge two divisions, would either division be considered “killed,” assuming the overall change had effected more profit for the company? Such is the way with the Student Concerns, Environment, Academic Enhancement and Diversity Committees. Because they often traverse each other’s purviews, it makes all too much sense to streamline those into one single committee that serves as a forum to attack concerns of students head on – and from back to front, top to bottom and all the other angles present in the complex issues of students at any typical college campus.

So as a final challenge to the members of the editorial board of The Daily Campus, I propose the following:

A) See for yourself.

Upon asking the former Environment Chair Joseph Grinnell if he was satisfied with the text of the committee’s bylaws, whose creation team included the current chair herself, he responded, “I haven’t read them.” Given previous Ed Board OpEd pieces, I’m positive the same holds true for the writers of the DC.

B) Understand the process.

If you don’t know the ins and outs of the changes that were made, don’t bother commenting on them. It only serves to misinform a student body that many times is already devoid of critical information. We saw that when visited by Mayor Miller (understanding Dallas politics and understanding our politics are starkly different).

C) If you don’t like what the Student Senate is doing, change it.

For some reason, I feel like I’ve been explaining to draft-dodgers what the war is actually about, which is nothing short of maddening. Although each member of the editorial board apparently feels so passionately against the senate’s mortifying dissolution of the Environment Committee, not a single one of these people as much as ran for a position that would allow them to change what is so unremittingly infuriating them, regardless of the fact that it hasn’t even been given the first chance to succeed. Here’s my “Rule No. 1”: if you don’t like how things are running, get involved and change it yourself. There’s nothing productive in writing about how much senate stinks if you’re not active in actually doing something to make it better.

I’m not typically the one to care about getting the last word, but it is clearly time that, with all facts presented time and time again, this debate came to an end. And not a moment too soon.

About the writer:

Jonathan Lane is junior psychology and real estate finance major. He aslo the Student Senate Chief of Staff. He can be reached at [email protected].