Infiltration mission failure: my attempt to attend the SG banquet

You know those events that happen around the same time every year? As my second year at UF comes to a close, I’ve started to get a sense of when the yearly events happen around here.

Every year in April is the Student Government inaugural banquet, during which the new executive ticket gets inaugurated, SG doles out some awards and outgoing members give farewell speeches.

Last week, I got a funny “isn’t the banquet supposed to be happening now?” thought. At the same point in time last year, I had already received the invite sent to the entire Senate listserv and a final RSVP reminder email.

It quickly became apparent the SG banquet this year was not open to all of SG. Putting heads together with some friends, we figured out SG booked the Stephen C. O’Connell Center for this past Wednesday night and had also asked executive branch staffers to help with the decorations.

During our Tuesday night Senate meeting, I asked this question: “What happened to our invites?” I asked the Information and Communications chair about it during her weekly report, but the senate president stepped in, saying that it was Smith Meyers’ banquet and if I had questions, I should email him. I attempted to ask who got an invite during announcements but was quickly shut down by senate leadership.

I resolved to try to go to the banquet anyhow. You can’t close off an SG funded event, right?

Turns out, you can. I was stopped at the door and told if I wasn’t on the list, I wouldn’t be able to go in. Even the two staffers at the check-in hadn’t been invited, nor were they given food (that really pissed me off). I scanned the list of those invited: majority party loyalists, their significant others and administrators. Not only did the full Senate not receive invitations, but also members of the majority party who were deemed not important enough to be there.

I stood there, texting folks I could try to have whisk me in as a plus one. No luck there. I grappled with the strong desire to walk past the check-in table while the staffers pleaded with me to not cause a scene and to pick my battles. (I am, in fact, a “chaotic good” disguised as a “lawful good,” so I try not to blow my cover for the petty things.)

After around an hour (I arrived late), people started to trickle out. The staffers at check-in got up to leave, and I followed them inside. To be quite honest, the banquet seemed quite small, perhaps due to the juxtaposition of the O’Connell Center’s vast interior. Almost immediately, people started making comments at me, as if everyone knew I hadn’t been invited. I bumped into the SG adviser who revealed to me the banquet wasn’t funded using student fees, rather by external revenue, which was why it was legally permissible to deny students, even SG Senators, entry. He recommended I leave and I did, slipping away into the night like a scorned lover.

Okay, so why bother with all the salt and pettiness of burning so many words on this? I think this is important because, as the saying goes, “the fish rots from the head down.” If the banquet for SG’s cream of the crop is so exclusive, what does that say about the rest of our administration? What kind of inauguration excludes Senators and the press? I would rather have an event that is accommodating for a lot of people, than have to pick between inviting members’ significant others or other SG officers. If I had my way, we’d be having the SG banquet in the Reitz Union food court so we could instead use the banquet money, source of which be damned, to benefit the Student Body.

SG shouldn’t be run like a private club, and even if it is, they should at least feed the people manning check-in at the door.

Questions, comments or concerns? Email me at: zchou@ufl.edu.

Zachariah Chou is a UF political science sophomore and Murphree Area Senator. His column focuses on Student Government.