The Campus Conservative

(Source: via Flickr) Knowing how to campaign is an important skill for a student representative. Those who can launch a basic, effective campaign can move others to action and rally support for their cause. Contrarily, those who do not know how to campaign effectively often go unheard and lack important support for their priorities.  If you are going to be an effective student representative, then you must learn how to run a basic campaign. In this post, I share steps for how to implement a successful campaign. While there are different types of campaigns (such internal and external SGA campaigns, or re-election campaigns and letter-writing campaigns), they all contain the same basic elements.  By working on the fundamentals, these skill of knowing how to launch a successful campaign will follow you anywhere you need to go, whether in an internal election to support your senator project or an external effort to win re-election. Master these common fundamentals and you will be ...

(Source: via Flickr) Student government is the most powerful lobbying group on-campus. In 2016, a group of four senators used student government to successfully lobby university leadership to adopt a campus-wide tobacco-free policy which is still in effect today. Student government in 2016 also called on leadership to raise tuition, raise the mandatory athletics fee for all students and in other years advocated for many other initiatives that moved university leadership to act.  The lesson here is that if student government adopts your cause, then significant things can happen for your cause. However, inside the organization, SGA governs itself by a popular parliamentary rulebook called Roberts Rules of Order. Created by Henry Martin Robert in 1876, many regard Roberts Rules as the authoritative manual for how to govern an organization  according to parliamentary order. However, this rulebook means that while senators are free to voice opinions, official adoption of those opin...

("Keyboard" by ericnvntr via Flickr)  In my previous entry, I discussed the importance of a student senator’s ability to communicate and how, without this ability, he cannot represent his constituency. I commended senators to master the persuasive essay to be effective representatives.  Yet now, a daunting challenge awaits him: actually doing the writing! Writing is difficult. People often do not know where to start and the foreign process can demoralize people to the point that they quit altogether. Given its difficulty, here are three tips to help beginner writers succeed in persuasive writing.  First, remember that writing takes a process. It is easy to think that when we read other people’s essays that they probably wrote their essay in one try. That is, they sat down, typed some things on the computer and voila! A finished product. They must have finished in less than 15 minutes. Yet, this is not how good writing often occurs.  Writing is more like baking a cake...

(Feature Image: Via Flickr.) In a student senator’s journey to represent his constituency, he must learn to become persuasive. That is, he must understand rhetoric and reason, and he must know how to make a good argument so that his audience will favor his constituency’s interests. I have learned that there is no better tool for this than the five-paragraph persuasive essay. Through it, one becomes aware of what makes for compelling speech: a thesis, claim, argument, supporting argument, illustration and call to action. These and many other elements a practitioner learns by practicing the persuasive essay. Moreover, for a student senator to give voice to his constituency's concerns, he must be able to speak for them in persuasive ways to sway decision-makers and to win others to their cause. The persuasive essay allows him to do this through its rational structure.  Therefore, for a student senator to effectively represent his constituency, he must endeavor to master the pers...

(Source: "Meeting" by TLC Johnson via Flickr) In 2016, three student government members successfully lobbied the university to adopt a “tobacco free” policy. How did they do it? Rather than work independently, they persuaded student government to take up their cause. In this respect, it was not really these three members who were successful, but student government itself, with its incredible advocacy power, who helped sway the institution to adopt the policy.  So why did it work this way instead of these three members being successful outside of student government? The answer is because of the university’s commitment to a governance system called “shared governance”. As a result, three student government members leveraged student government’s massive advocacy power for their cause. They changed university policy and UT-Tyler is still tobacco-free today. This situation illustrates that student senators who wish to advocate for their constituencies successfully must leverage t...