The administration and its supporters’ massive ‘Vote No, Pro-Stroh’ campaign wasted thousands of University dollars on a misleading propaganda push that created a completely false sense in the minds of students. If they were to vote ‘Yes’ to repeal the Undergraduate Student Government’s decision to charge students an extra $60 per semester for the Stroh Center, then this wonderful structure would not have been built. I recognize what’s done is done and to dwell on something so corrosive to unity on this campus is not constructive. I would, however, like to point out the controversy over the referendum process and students’ rights in general has been kept alive due to the latest changes in the USG Constitution which occurred Monday at the most recent USG meeting. These changes happened with minimal insight from the student body as a whole. I am confident that, if shown what their representatives in USG have done to weaken or outright eliminate many of their democratic rights, they would have surely disagreed with them. The first thing changed was the referendum process. One gets the impression USG does not want something like the Stroh Center referendum, the first time in University history students challenged a decision made by USG, to ever happen again. With the new changes set in place, before students can even start collecting signatures for a petition to get a referendum, they have to schedule within 10 days of the passage of the resolution in question a meeting with the procedures and appeals committee that will be open to the public. Once that meeting is scheduled (and there is no stipulation that it has to be scheduled promptly by the procedures and appeals committee), the committee can approve or deny the petition for whatever reason, all while putting the petitioner through what could definitely be a pressure cooker of peer pressure at the meeting. If they do approve it, the student has 10 academic days to collect signatures from five percent of the student body. That’s two weeks to collect almost a thousand signatures given the University’s present population of around 17,000. Before this change, the referendum process was pretty simple as described in the Constitution: draw up a petition at any time, take as much time as necessary to collect five percent of the student body’s signatures and P#s, and present it to the chairperson of the procedures and appeals committee. They were then mandated by the Constitution to put the referendum on the ballot for students to vote on within 15 academic days after the initial presentation. Now USG has added an extra layer of bureaucracy that has the power to stop a referendum movement dead in its tracks. In addition to all that, under yet another reform passed on Monday, students will now no longer be able to remove their representatives through the recall process if they feel their USG official is not representing them well. Under the old Constitution, a petition process was in place that allowed them to do so; now all the student body can do is turn in what amounts to a request form to USG and count on the institution to oust one of its own. Yet another route of direct democracy stricken from the old Constitution was the right to appeal any decision made by USG to remove of one of their Senators. In the past when USG decided to kick out a senator, if enough of that senator’s constituency felt they were unfairly punished they could collect signatures to have a vote on whether the senator should have been removed. These ‘reforms’ to the Constitution were passed almost unanimously by USG with only a single ‘no’ vote and one abstention. This is what happens when we as a student body ignore our duties as constituents of USG, which claims to be the only legitimate voice of the entire student population. This is what happens when you choose not to vote in USG elections going on this week, or choose to be an uninformed voter and just vote for whatever name you recognize best. This is what happens when barely anyone shows up for USG meetings on Monday nights (7:30 p.m., Union room 308), and when most Senators in most elections (including this one) are running unopposed. There’s currently no one at all running for either the 10th Off-Campus seat or the College of Technology seat. The days we can just sit back and trust some other person to care about the institution that is supposed to represent us are over. The truth is, USG does matter, and if the student body as a whole is not contributing to the decision making process at the top, who is? —Sean Lutzmann is a contender for a seat in Undergraduate Student Government.