"While some leaders might take Friday’s editorials to heart or feel attacked, we are renewed. It is encouraging that students care enough about student representation and governance to challenge it. VSG and its constitution will grow and change like any other entity, and we encourage all students to get involved with VSG and to voice their concerns to student leaders."

Banning people who haven't been involved with SGA or Interhall in the past is hardly encouraging all students to get involved. You allow students to come in on lower levels, which isn't just. Even if you take the referendum vote at its face-value (which considering it included only a small proportion of the students, is rather ludicrous), rather than saying the entire student body was for your ideas, it indicates that the voting students were desirous of CHANGE.Saying that the experience requirement is to make the transition easier is almost funny, since VSG is intendence to replace the old units (rather than be a new version of them). VSG, as the conglomeration of SGA and Interhall, is pretty much the same thing; it simply houses the two groups under one roof. The outcry against the experience requirement has been widespread: this indicates that at the least, the vote should have been redone. The fact that it was not retaken, despite extraordinarily low participation, indicates that what you want is not, in fact, to do what Vanderbilt students want, but to find a way to get yourselves more power (or at least a better title for your resume for grad school).

I hope that I end up being proven wrong about my feelings regarding VSG, but I remain concerned.

"Ultimately, however, VSG is a product of the student vote, which ratified the Vanderbilt Student Government Constitution at 92 percent approval Nov. 27, 2006."

The vote total for the VSG merger referendum came to 1,056 for to 112 against (source: http://www.insidevandy.com/drupal/node/2160). While 1,056 out of 1,168 may be 92 percent, a total of 6,402 undergrads were eligible to vote. (source: http://registrar.vanderbilt.edu/stats/tenth06f.html). Only 1,056 out of the 6,402 undergraduate students actually supported the merger and voted that way. For those of you keeping score at home, that's an overall voter approval rating of 16.5%, or slightly worse than a rate of one vote of approval per six undergraduate students. It appears that I was being a bit generous in my letter to the editor by saying that 20% of the student body approved the merger.

Kevin McNish

Arts & Science '08