Meredith Shamburger

The house sat quietly with its main door propped open. The atmosphere was somber. Moving day had come, but no goodbye celebrations full of hope and promise were taking place.

Up the stairs to the right, down the winding hallway lined with boxes and bare walls, sophomore Jack Haake’s room is decorated with two beds and a coffee table between them. In the corner beside a stack of LSAT prep books is the Band of Brothers DVD set.

Dr. Pepper cans litter the flat surfaces, and a sombrero hangs on one bed.

Haake is wearing his LXA letters, even though he’s not supposed to as a former member in bad standing.

“I’m not going to leave until they do [put an eviction notice on my door],” Haake said. “I’m not going to leave because an alumni said I had to. The school owns the house—the school didn’t kick me out. Texas State Law says you have 90 days to be evicted. And neither the national fraternity or the school is above the law.”

Haake is sitting next to another sophomore, Hayden Blair. Both students were expelled last weekend from the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity because of charges THAT they say are a lie.

“We don’t deserve this,” Haake said.

SMU’s Lambda Chi Alpha chapter saw 36 members expelled last Sunday after conducting a membership review the previous Saturday.

Forty-seven members saw all charges against them dropped and were returned to good standing within the organization. Several members, who were not expelled, as well as alumni, have resigned their membership from the fraternity. The Daily Campus could not find any official total concerning those who have resigned because the number keeps growing as each day passes.

According to John Holloway, director of chapter services of the international headquarters for Lambda Chi, the membership review came after a “thorough and sophisticated assessment” from which chapter alumni and international headquarters “corroborated reports of hazing, drug use in the chapter house and risky behaviors with little to no consequence at any level within the organization.”

“None of us saw any of this coming,” sophomore William Crouse said.

Published by The Daily Campus. Read the rest here.

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Senators promote transparency, fail to record votes

SMU Student Senators debated a bill at their December 1 meeting that would allow a senator to submit legislation without attaching his or her name to it.

Senators were divided on the issue.

“I am against this because every student has the right to know what pieces are written and by whom,” engineering senator Joseph Esau said during the debate. “They all have the right to a transparent government.”

Jack Benage, former membership committee chair, had a different opinion. He supported the bill and urged senators not to evaluate the bill based on transparency.

“Sure the student would not know who authored the piece, but they would know about the piece,” he said at the meeting.

The bill ultimately failed, 30-6.  It is not known which senators voted for or against this legislation because no one recorded their votes.

This is not an unusual situation. A Daily Campus investigation found that student senators rarely practice transparency by using a roll call to record their votes.

Based on available records for the past five years, senators have voted on 92 bills, but only used the roll call vote four times, or less than 5 percent. This means that SMU students would find it virtually impossible to judge a senator based on his or her voting record.

Senators routinely failed to record their votes even though most votes were split, meaning it was not unanimous. Split votes occurred on 70 bills, including all four roll call votes. Unanimous votes took place on just 22 pieces of legislation.

“I’m thinking they must have had more than four important votes since 2005,” graduate student Ava Damri said.

Published by The Daily Campus. Read the rest here.

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While no one was throwing punches, things got a little heated in the Hughes-Trigg Commons area Tuesday evening.

Student Body Officer candidates gathered for the Student Body Officers Debate, where they asked and answered questions about their positions and past actions.

Moderator Mark McPhail, chair of the corporate communications and public affairs department, asked the candidates two questions about the most important quality in a leader and which leader they felt they best identified with. Candidates then took questions from the audience and from each other.

One student asked the candidates which actions from the administration that they disagreed with.

Jake Torres, who is running for Student Body President, expressed dissatisfaction with the school’s acceptance of two  mustangs from T. Boone Pickens.

“I really disagreed with the way they [the administration] treated Peruna,” he said, noting that the administration accepted them “without really asking any of the students.”

Torres cited this as an example which “reflects a bigger issue—that is the disconnect with the wishes of the students and the actions taken by the administration.”

Presidential candidate Jack Benage garnered a round of applause when he stated that students should be given more reading days at the end of the semester.

“The administration and the President’s Task Force has removed a few of our reading days to try to avoid students trying to take the extra time, instead of studying, to go party,” he said. “I think that’s something we need to work on—to get those reading days back as all the students shouldn’t be punished because someone else is choosing to misuse their time.”

Most of the questioning focused on past legislation and the impact that it had.

Published by The Daily Campus. Read the rest here.