I Guess It’s Gotta Be Dramatic

By Nathaniel Skutley

In September 2019 I began my first semester as President of the Student Government Association. I was excited and had many goals to reform the SGA, but it didn’t go according to plan. At a meeting later in the year, a senator we’ll refer to as “L” proclaimed to me in a meeting;

“We the Senate are dissatisfied with your leadership and would like to give you a chance to resign.”

“Excuse me?” I asked in complete shock, quickly responding before he could, “No, I will not resign and I look forward to seeing you all next week.”

To understand how this happened and where it came from, I had to have a moment of reflection with my good friend and Vice President of the Student Government, Jordan Bellante.

I went to Jordan some time later that day at the comfy seats tucked away by the stairs in the cafeteria. Jordan, with his deep echoing voice, and I, discussed and decided we needed to understand their viewpoint, and that started with the beginning of my presidency.

To start the fall semester, I thought it was necessary to implement and pass a new constitution as soon as possible. After reviewing the previous constitution for the UWM-WC SGA and 104 google doc suggestions later, we decided we needed a new one. 

By the authoring of Jordan and myself, it added a substantial amount of material concerning all forms of procedure and a judiciary. The beautifully dry document was 12 pages compared to the previously two paged constitution. 

I was very confident in it being passed in the first two meetings, but my projection turned out to be a little off, by five months. The entire semester unraveled into contention on the document that was supposed to be uniting and non-partisan, I didn’t even know there were sides or even parties within the UWM-WC SGA! The most opposition emerged from a senator who was on the losing end of my presidential campaign, we’ll refer to them as Senator F. 

Senator F rallied new members of the SGA into a belief that the new constitution was “shady.” This erupted from a summer meeting erecting the proposed constitution, of which they couldn’t make. This created even more animosity in this person towards myself, not to mention the campaign I won, that continued to boil as the semester began. Within the first three weeks of my presidency, our advisor received a complaint about me and my communication. We talked as a whole SGA about communication and we decided on Snapchat and Microsoft Teams as our form of communicating. Snapchat would turn out to be the bain of my presidential existence as it created more misunderstandings within the SGA. Many messages were taken out of context which lead to Senator F and their allies dumping fuel on the fire. Most were from myself and lead to more complaints, that were directed at the advisor and not myself.

Over the semester I continued to hear whispers of drama within the SGA Senators, but decided it wasn’t my place as a leader to get involved. This, along with my lack of knowledge of complaints due to them never approaching me in person, lead to my complete shock when Senator L asked for me to resign. This led to two trail like settings where I sat in front of a room and had senators describe their problems with me, for an hour and a half each. Pretty invigorating, not gonna lie. Many good points of constructive criticism came from members who were not in league with Senator F, of whom didn’t show up to either meetings. I said all of about 30 words during each meeting to acquit myself. With the help of Jordan, basically acting as my defense lawyer while masterfully staying as bipartisan as possible, the allies of Senator F had their arguments defeated one by one. One declared I was corrupt, dramatic I know, for announcing to the SGA during session “the chair would look favorable upon a motion for *Blank.” This is in contention for the most absurd of the claims as it is a common phrase used by a chair within Robert’s Rules of Order, however, it demonstrated the ignorance of many of the senators due to faulty veteran influence, something I have strove to fix and have begun to today. In the end, the estimated Senator Dominc Robson declared, “Every single allegation has been dropped.”