Chungbuk National University(CBNU) is composed of 13 colleges and 72 departments. Each college(with the exception of the College of Education) and department has student councils apart from the General Students' Association(GSA) of CBNU. These dozens of student councils are carrying out their duties as they represent students' opinions.
GSA liaises between the school and the students. They must also make their school culture healthy by collecting students' public opinions and democratically proceeding with the work. They should help students achieve harmony. Even if the student councils of colleges and departments are smaller than GSA, they have the same roles.
However, student councils that must realize and learn democracy are using an undemocratic manner of succession. The cases of sole candidates are prevalent in elections because of students¡¯ indifference. In actuality, in the 2011 election of the colleges' student councils, the number of colleges where a sole candidate ran for president of student council accounted for about 80 percent of all colleges. Nobody even ran for student council for the College of Education this year, so it is not working now.
In reference to succession, Lee Ki-hoon(Economics '07) expressed, "I¡¯m beginning to doubt how student councils which are made in this manner possibly represent students' opinions." An anonymous student said, "In a case with a passive or small college or department, a sole candidate is common. All cases of sole candidates are not bad. However, I thinks it is succession because this sole candidate appears by receiving support from the former student council." Another anonymous student expressed, ¡°I suspect a sole candidate whose ability is untested for the simple reason that the former student council and candidates were in the same department, were executives together or had personal connections.¡±
"Although the students vote for the next term's student council, the results of the polls are partly predetermined due to the former student council's support," said an interested person of a certain department student council of the College of Engineering. However, most of the student council refuted the student's opinion. Lee Ho-gi, the president of the College of Agriculture, Life, & Environmental Sciences student council, said, "Even if there is a sole candidate, students' votes of yea or nay finally decide the president of the student council." Then, he added that one candidate running is not planned on purpose but it's just that there's no one to enter into race. Kim Sung-jin, the manager of the general affairs department of the College of Social Sciences, said, "Most people who are elected as the president of student councils are interested in working for their school and they actively help it. At the bottom, these people naturally get to be intimate with each other. For this reason, I think the students suspect the successions of student councils."
According to the current election bylaws, every student, who has been going to school for over four semesters and whose average GPAs is at least 2.60 through all semesters, can run for the president of the student council. However, the student council truly does not represent students' opinions because students only call for the yeas and nays in elections with a sole candidate. Now, we, as voters, should discuss the way to diversify the candidates in order to choose the true council representative who fulfill what we want, and to well organize real student councils.
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