“The Advocate” swings punches, falls flat
By J. M. Gosman
Once upon a time, a young and naïve Student Ambassador was sitting at his place in the Office of Student Development. It had been a normal day, one full of laughter and brotherhood. How anything could go wrong was beyond him. All of a sudden lightning struck, the sky darkened, a cold wind blew, and a single sheet of paper landed on the young man’s hand. The cloaked messenger was gone in a flash, but in her place was The Advocate—Ivy Tech Bloomington’s Realistic Source for Information. The rebellion had begun.
To the young man (me,) the sheet of paper was innocuous. It was just another memo and I probably wasn’t the intended recipient anyway. What I didn’t realize was that the young woman who brought in these “newsletters” was completely serious about and devoted to what they said. All in all, it was statement on her views of the Student Government Association (also known as the SGA). To put it lightly, these views are a little less than positive.
Freedom of speech is all fine and well, but it’s also important to get your facts straight, something that fictional publisher Liz Henderson failed to do. Aside from eliminating factual discrepancies, your first step should be to get an editor, Advocate. The “feature” in the September issue was a page and a half of roasting the SGA, but I could barely understand a quarter of it. I took plenty of notes on why your paper was poorly written, and I’d be more than happy to share them with you. And by the way, it’s hard to make an academic audience take you seriously if you include “The Dumb Dirty Joke From Dad” in every issue.
So here it is: a partial list of all the things that The Advocate got wrong. By the way, it seems to me that these are some pretty major discrepancies to be made by someone who claims to be so closely involved with the organization. You be the judge:
“I attempted to attend a attend a SGA meeting as scheduled and emailed to all students at Ivy Tech of Bloomington, when I arrived at the meeting on Thursday, September 6th at noon in Lampkin [sic] Hall as the email said, I found a locked empty room.”
According to SGA Vice President David Conder, there was no meeting scheduled for the 6th, and no email with that date delivered to the student body. The point of the example was to suggest that only a select number of student and faculty knew of the meeting and held it in secret. According to Conder, this is also false.
“It would behoove the campus to take a part in SGA, currently there is approximately. $78,000 dollars in the SGA bank account that needs to be spent.
Hold on a second, SGA bank account? In an interview with Tehanee Ratwatte, an advisor of the SGA, I found that there is no SGA bank account. All funds go through to Ivy Tech Business Office. She also told me the budget this year has not been finalized, and the only funds that are left in that account are left from last semester. I was also assured that the account was nowhere near as large as what was projected in The Advocate.
“Fact: every year, multiple scholarships for schooling AND childcare go unclaimed from Ivy Tech SGA.”
Fact: There never has been, nor will there soon be, and SGA scholarship to pay for childcare. Every year, the SGA awards a number of Fred Jones Scholarships, which are used to offset the costs of books. All in all, six scholarship recipients are decided upon by a committee consisting of Ivy Tech faculty and staff.
The only redeeming quality of The Advocate is its purpose. Attention should be paid to all the Student Government Association does. That being said, the most effective way to encourage student involvement is not through secrecy and slander, but through example. Maybe “Liz Henderson” should not hide behind a poorly written paper, and run for a leadership position herself. It’s easy to sit around and tell people what to do, but it’s much more effective to get out there and make a difference yourself. So to the student body, consider being involved in SGA. Everyone is invited to the monthly meetings, and elected positions will be voted on October 15th.
And to “Liz Henderson,” I personally would be thrilled to sit down and talk to you about how to write a publication that people take seriously. I’m all for freedom of speech, but freedom of speech can only be utilized effectively if it’s utilized with responsibility and morality.
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