Conflict-free campaigning.
That was the goal for both parties during the UF Student Government Spring 2012 General Election, and as election week drew near, it looked like the university would see a spotless finish to a semester of platform-based movements.
Then, on Feb. 20, two separate eyewitnesses reported that an individual wearing a Unite Party T-shirt had thrown away 268 copies of The Independent Florida Alligator.
A majority of the Student Body’s first exposure to the incident was the next day’s edition of the Alligator, which featured one staff report and two editorials focused on the paper-trashing.
Overnight, an election season, which had been distinguishably clean and fair, lost its message of positive campaigning, and our campus returned to its habitual ways of character-assassination politics.
I can only describe the result as one of the most surprising and aggressive attacks I have ever seen from a large portion of the UF Greek community.
People weren’t just angry with what was published — they were livid. Social networks were overrun with students’ backlash at the Alligator, by both Student Government parties and their fellow students.
“The only thing the alligator is independent of is integrity.”
“I threw a copy of the Alligator away today. Are they going to write an article about it?”
These insults and more flooded my Facebook newsfeed for hours on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.
As a member of the Greek community and a student studying journalism, I witnessed my friends from other sororities and fraternities who work for the Alligator feel the backlash from this defamation of their personal integrity and the publication’s integrity.
They had become villains because of an article they hadn’t even written, guilty by professional association.
And just how quickly did we forget the Alligator’s belief in the Unite Party’s ability to complete platforms and better our university? Last spring, the Alligator chose to endorse the Unite Party and has done so multiple times in the past.
The paper was still publishing letters to the editor that favored the Unite Party less than a week before elections.
Profiles of both sets of executive-ticket members were run two days before elections.
Even so, a large amount of us still chose to believe that the largest student-run newspaper in the U.S. was a biased publication when it reported on Beatrice Diehl’s negative personal experiences as a member of the Greek community during these elections.
We chose to write slanderous things about members of our houses who worked for the Alligator after the paper ran an editorial reprimanding dirty politics.
We chose to make the gap between Greek and non-Greek students even wider by disowning our own friends as political enemies and bringing national attention to our university through extremist websites like TotalFratMove.com.
But are we justified in doing any of these things?
Should we think it fair that we blindly label our brothers and sisters as propagandists because their professional affiliation doesn’t agree with ours? Should we openly criticize one of our member’s attempts to legitimately advance his or her career if it might steal a few votes from another who is running for office, but ignore those scorning their fellow Greeks for practicing their most basic democratic rights?
Should these Greeks feel ashamed for not being a part of the majority?
The answer is no.
We have been responsible for making our fellow Greeks victims of a Student-Government groupthink that has become the basis of an intense double standard based on party loyalty in the UF Greek system.
We are becoming bigoted with “our party” to the point of becoming prejudiced toward some of our closest friends.
We cannot label ourselves as leaders in our community while remaining so intolerant of the beliefs of others.
Acts and arguments showing unprecedented hatred toward an organization or another group of students were exactly what both the Unite Party and Students Party were trying to avoid in this year’s election.
If this election taught us anything, it would be that next year we cannot let ourselves regress to mudslinging and finger-pointing politics after a semester of campaigns based on ambitious platforms and uniting the Student Body.
For now, it’s up to both sides of this election to reunite the Student Body as a whole and to continue improving our university through Student Government.
Michael Scott Davidson is a journalism junior at UF. He is a former editor of the Odyssey.
