Your Student Assembly, in the final meeting of this session, passed the Publications Council Contract Approval Act, the Election Reform Act and the Blue Book Extension Act.
The Publications Council Contract Approval Act approves the SA’s three year contract with the pub council with few changes to the old contract. The most important of which is the addition of language intended to incentivize publications to generate their own revenue. Simply put, if a publication generates revenue, the following year they will receive a bonus of half that revenue which must be put towards a new service for students and the bonus is capped at $3,000. As a participant in the biggest publication on this campus I think this is a really great way to encourage the expansion of smaller publications. Even more encouraging is that the language has a wide definition of revenue which includes money generated through fundraisers, so if you don’t want to cheapen the content of your publication with advertisements you can still receive this additional funding.
The Election Reform Act makes a series of changes to the practices of the elections commission, most importantly, requiring its formation fourteen days prior to the given election in the effort to properly advertise the election. I find it hard to believe that any addition to the SA’s constitution will magically empower the body to properly organize an election so I really did not think too much about this bill. If next semesters freshmen elections go off without a hitch, I will send highly personalized letters of congratulation to the bill’s sponsors.
The Blue Book Extension Act allocates $5,000 from the consolidated reserve to purchase blue books for the remainder of this year and all of next. There is no reason why all professors shouldn’t allow students to take their exams on blackboard and do away with blue books altogether. This school has an honor code, a body to enforce it and an overly obedient student population apparently not in favor of dissolving the aforementioned body. If we have these things there is no reason not to test them by allowing students to take their exams online instead of on paper.
I also feel the need to mention the actions of a far more nefarious governing body. One would imagine that Gov. Bob McDonnell would have met his racism quota for at least the rest of April when he declared it white history month without mentioning that white people used to be allowed to own other people, but apparently not. Albeit in an altered form, McDonnell has reinstituted literacy tests. The same literacy tests used to disenfranchise black people after the civil war, which I assume, like slavery, McDonnell was unaware of. For some reason, Virginia (along with Kentucky) requires an act of governor to reinstate a released felon’s voting rights. Now, instead of merely filling out a form, a released felon must write an essay to McDonnell detailing what he has contributed to society since being released from prison. On the one hand I am interested in anything that will take up McDonnell’s day so he has less time to figure out how to reanimate the rotting corpse of Jefferson Davis, but on the other, based on his knowledge of history, I’m fairly sure he can’t read. I have no doubt that is only the beginning of McDonnell’s master plan to create a tear in the space/time continuum in order to escape the frightening social progressions of the 20th century.
I’d like to open the comment boards to future acts of the governor that he might consider when deciding how to further Virginia’s devolution.
The Zerbo Zone is an opinions blog by Flat Hat online editor Russ Zerbo. The views expressed are those of the author only.
