By Akeem Mellis

On Tuesday night, the Student Government Association took one step closer to living up to the very ideals it was created for in the first place by rejecting legislation that would have lowered the Grade Point Average required to be elected President or Vice President from 2.5 to 2.25.

In a semester full of mistakes and conflicts, seeing this bill passed with the stark possibility of it being applied retroactively for the upcoming elections would have added to the confusion and disorder the senate has tried its best to clean up.

The fact that this bill was introduced in the first place illustrates how some in the senate were radically misguided in their noble attempt to “set things straight.” At the beginning of the debate on “Proposal 6-GPA Requirements,” some senators, including one of the sponsors of the bill, stated that their motivation for supporting the measure was not based on their personal bias in favor of SGA President Peter DiSilvio, whom the entire senate, myself included, respect and admire.

Yet, as the debate waged on, it became all too clear from their statements, and the statements from some members of the gallery in attendance, that their support for the proposal was completely based on their personal preference of President DiSilvio, and not on setting the bar for future presidential and vice presidential candidates to run on. As a result, the opinions of those in favor of the bill, and of the debate itself, were tainted with a predisposition for one person, not on the future of the elections process.

To have the Senate lower the G.P.A. requirement would have cheapened and undermined the standards by which we want the SGA president and vice president to live up to. Another element some failed to consider was the fact that the 2007 SGA election process was already underway, with campaigning for the two tickets set to start the following morning.

As a senate, we could not blissfully ignore this fact just to unnecessarily rewrite one rule so another ticket could participate. That would not be fair.

Nor would it be fair to discard the final ruling from the elections commission. For all their faults-and they had plenty of them-they made a decision based on the circumstances. To witness a senator viciously accuse those members of “not having a heart” was disgraceful, and showed a lack of respect for the SGA constitution, and its rules and regulations.

In retrospect, we would have set a very dangerous precedent regarding the ineligibility of a ticket. What would have happened if the senate was confronted with this same situation one year from now? Would we lower it yet again? What about for 2009, or for subsequent years?

These are the reasons why I, along with a dozen other senators, voted against this measure, and it is why the senate made the right decision to maintain the high standards of this organization.

——————————-Akeem Mellis is a freshman communications student. You can e-mail him at [email protected]