I spent my four years of undergrad vexed and pained by the annual student senate races. While I never thought of student senate itself as a cause of serious problems on campus, it seemed a symptom of the larger ills that plagued an institution that seemed more a parody of education than a pantheon for it.
I spent my four years of undergrad vexed and pained by the annual student senate races. While I never thought of student senate itself as a cause of serious problems on campus, it seemed a symptom of the larger ills that plagued an institution that seemed more a parody of education than a pantheon for it.
It was bad enough that tuition kept rising, that our football coach made more than most of my professors combined, and that national news paid more attention to our parties than our achievements. To add to all that the t-shirt politics of the existing student government was enough to push me away from any institutionalized power structures within the university and to seek out social nooks and crannies where I didn’t have to think about the big issues facing higher education at the case in point where I went to school.
All of that discontent was why I followed the campaign of Restart closely. When they ran, I was a graduate with no real reason to follow undergraduate student government at a university that I felt had failed to deliver on the lofty expectations I had set for my post-secondary education. But still, even as I was working jobs that had nothing to do with my degree, wishing I had listened to Journalism 101 professors who told me I’d never get a job in the field, I felt a faint flicker of hope and inspiration that here was a student government ticket that wasn’t afraid to take stances on actual issues. Here was a student government platform built on meaningful change and critical thinking, not pretty colors and clever names. Here were candidates willing to be arrested for a peaceful protest of a tuition hike.
All of this is related now to President Megan Marzec’s blood bucket challenge video, in which she uses a social media phenomenon to demonstrate a serious message about a serious issue. Debate that issue—of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine—with her if you want, but don’t invoke the notion of disgrace in response to political activism. To do so is to uphold a paradigm of censorship that Restart, from its earliest days, has fought to overthrow. To me, Restart represents a lot more than any single issue they might take a stance on. They represent the possibility that outsider and sometimes radical voices still have a place in democratic politics, which is an essential component of any true democracy.
A call for her resignation is a call for a return to a status quo where student senate presidents make news for other, much less meaningful social media outbursts.
Max Cothrel is a 2013 alumnus of Ohio University.
