Natural Born Fighter

Trey Smith

In one of the boxes I sifted through last night, I discovered all the press clippings and legal documents from my two year fight with the Student Government Association (SGA) at Pittsburg State University. In reading over the material one last time, it dawned on me how naive I was back in the early 90s.

You see, I have always been a stickler for rules. It is not that I believe that all rules are right and just, it's more that, if an organization, company or society makes rules, then they should follow them! If you don't want to follow them, then get rid of them! In my mind's eye, it is asinine to craft rules that you intend to violate at will.

And this is where my naivety comes in. At the time I enrolled in grad school, I already understood that justice in America is a two-tiered system. Universal rules are applied to the vast majority, but those in the ruling class don't have to follow them. What I didn't realize is this same general scheme applies to most groups and organizations. General members are expected to follow the stated rules and, if they don't, they can expect to suffer consequences. The higher ups in any group or organization, on the other hand, ignore the rules whenever it is convenient and yet they somehow are able to evade the consequences.

This was the beef I had with our university's SGA. The officers constantly violated the organization's bylaws and no one in the university -- not even the school's administration -- seemed willing to challenge OR overrule them...until I arrived on the scene.

Over the course of 3 semesters, I filed over 20 challenges before the student judicial court. In most of these cases, I won and yet, as in real life, these victories were hollow ones. While the student judicial court ruled on issue after issue that the SGA had violated its own rules and procedures, the illegal actions themselves were allowed to stand. The court promised that changes would be instituted in the future to curb SGA's illegal and unethical conduct.

Sound familiar? It should. That's exactly the way the federal government has dealt with all the misdeeds of Wall Street!