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Show The hangin' judge hung up Remember the myth of the great representative student government? You're not going to see it die out soon. In one of their less rational decisions this year the ASUL Judiciary has seen fit to perpetuate and even encourage J e nr y representative student government. They have made lega has been a common Student Assembly practice during 1 of, year: Complete disregard and ignorance of the assemblyma stituency. , The precedent was brought about by the Judiciary's decision on the case of the Eligibility Committee vs. Paul Handy assembly member from the College of Engineering, during h. term o office changed his major to law and entered the College of Law w -ch the Eligibility Committee decided invalidated his election last spring Student Judiciary then came out with this gem of which basically says there is no such thing as representat.ve student government. To quote from the text of the decision, "These colleges, however bear a much greater resemblance to special interest groups than to the citizenry of a specific geographic locale. Subjects causing diffenng opinions tend to be personal, not geographical, in nature. Tell us judiciary, what on earth does "geographical" have to do with anything? Geography no more determines a constituency than does length of toenails. Constituency has been determined by the AMJU Constitution to be the college wherein an assemblyman s maor resides, by the very fact that he is elected by that college. The new form of student government was obviously intended to be representative, represen-tative, yet the judiciary would do away with representation altogether. In building its case (if it could be called that), the judiciary says, "The freedom, and in fact, the necessity of declaring and changing majors has long been a recognized part of the University students' academic life." So how, judiciary, does this change anything? It seems to us quite reasonable to expect a candidate for the assembly to say to himself, "Well, if these people in this college are going to have me represent them in the assembly, I might as well settle down to the fact that I'll be here for a year, at least." The student judiciary has obviously not considered the practical aspects of this case. Is it reasonable to expect that an assembly member, once he has abondoned one college and settled down into the curriculum of another college, will go back to his old constituents and base his decisions on their desires? No, it's hardly reasonable. And is it reasonable to expect the students of a particular college to look up one morning and find their representative run off to another college, and then take off to this other college to tell "their" representative how they feel about things? That's hardly reasonable, either. Where do these people go when they have something to say to government? It seems the judiciary has forgotten that representation was the original idea to begin with. We ask the Assembly to amend the constitution to make changing ma'iors an obvious violation. This is a must if they purport to be concerned with representative government. Or if too many of them haven't changed majors already. |