Editorial: Student Disenfranchisement Invalidates Fee Referendum

 

(Photo: ''Court Gavel - Judge's Gavel - Courtroom'' by wp paarz via Flickr)

UT-Tyler administrators failed to declare an important conflict of interest during the fee debate, namely, that they were no longer working for students' best interests first, but for their employer's. This failure to declare this relationship change effectively deprived students of their ability to speak freely and therefore fully participate in the debate because they were ultimately afraid to disrespect authorities.

Without a clear understanding of students' relationship to administrators in the fee debate, students could not reasonably feel comfortable enough to speak freely, even critically, about the proposal. This deprived students of their ability to exercise their rights to self-determination. 

Therefore, UT-Tyler should not benefit from students' wrongful disenfranchisement and it should reject the athletics fee referendum results.

This is the argument I sent to UT-Tyler President Kirk Calhoun in an email this week calling on him to disregard the athletics fee referendum. I have included this message below. I redacted administrators' names since, at this time, both my claim and my argument are what is most important, rather than the specific administrators' names (which I sent to President Calhoun). I also copied [will copy] incoming UT-Tyler President Julie Philley.

UT-Tyler should nullify the athletics fee referendum results. Here is my message to President Calhoun. 

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Dear Dr. Kirk Calhoun, UT-Tyler President:

Greetings. My name is James Hescock and I publish an independent newsletter for UT-Tyler students called Patriot Weekly. I am not affiliated with the University.

I am writing to complain to you about three of your administrators’ behavior during the recent athletics fee referendum and to ask that you nullify the referendum results because of this behavior. The reason is that the student constituency has the right to self-determination, and if administrators undermine this right, or inhibit students’ ability to participate in campus discussion, then the University should not then benefit from students’ disenfranchisement from participation and self-determination. Therefore, I ask you to please reject the athletics referendum results on the grounds that the University did, in fact, wrongfully inhibit students from full participation in the fee debate. 

I believe administrators [the athletics director, the vice president of marketing and the senior vice president for student success] behaved unethically when they failed to declare their conflict of interest to the student body when they approached it this year to advocate for a student fee increase. This failure to declare their change in relationship to the student body due to new responsibilities they had to their employer incapacitated the student body’s ability to fully participate in the debate and left it at an unacceptable disadvantage.

Once administrators accepted responsibility to seek a fee increase for their employer, they could no longer act in students’ best interests as they had in the past (since their first responsibilities now lied with their employer).

However, since students only knew these administrators in their capacities to aid them with students’ best interests in mind, then students could not account for this change in their commitments without administrators’ explicit declaration.

Therefore, administrators’ failure to declare this new responsibility left students open to still seeing them as acting for students’ best interests, when in fact, they were acting for their employer’s best interests instead.

This failure and students' confusion at their new interaction with administrators left students incapacitated, not knowing how to pursue their own self-determination due to their traditional relationship with administrators. Instead, students still felt under pressure to respect authority, even when some may have felt administrators’ proposal for a fee increase conflicted with their own best interests. Others may have felt it was their responsibility to support administrators and therefore accepted the proposal without appropriate criticism.

In other words, students needed to be able to speak freely in the fee debate in order to represent their interests. Yet, they could not feel this was okay to do without an explicit declaration from administrators of their new relationship with students.

So, administrators’ failure to declare their new conflicts of interest left students in a tacitly disenfranchised state, unable to fully participate in the fee debate because they felt unable to speak freely due to pressures on them to respect their elders and their traditional relationship to administrators.

For this reason, I ask that you nullify the athletics fee referendum results given that administrators’ interference left students in a tacitly helpless state, one which they could not have gotten out of unless administrators explicitly declared the change in their relationship to students. Students needed to feel it was okay for them to speak freely, and because they could not do this, then they could not fully represent their best interests in the fee debate.

So, please reject the referendum results and afford students the protections that ought to come with their right to participate in campus discussions and ultimately with their right to self-determination. Please nullify the athletics fee referendum results.

Thank you for reading my message.

Sincerely,

James Hescock

Publisher, Patriot Weekly

cc: Dr. Julie V. Philley

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Feature Image: Photo: ''Court Gavel - Judge's Gavel - Courtroom'' by wp paarz via Flickr