Dozens of students showed up to ASUNM's biweekly meeting Wednesday to voice their disapproval of a proposed vote of confidence in President David Schmidly.
The undergraduate student government tabled the vote after the students at the meeting made it loud and clear that ASUNM would not be speaking for the student body if it passed the resolution. Some faculty and staff also attended to voice their opposition to the proposal.
ASUNM President Ashley Fate said the proposal had passed through the Steering and Rules Committee in last week's ASUNM meeting with a three-to-one vote, with one senator abstaining.
ASUNM Sen. Mario Hernandez framed the proposal for a vote of confidence in Schmidly. After the period of public comment, the Senate took a seven-minute recess. When they reconvened, Hernandez decided to remove his bill from the agenda.
"Due to student input we've heard today and other opinions we have heard, I think it's best that we table this for another time and completely go back to scratch and come back with a different resolution," Hernandez said.
Students in the crowd said they had gone to Santa Fe earlier that day to lobby against budget cuts for ethnic programs and had compiled a petition of more than 700 signatures for the cause.
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Hernandez said he presented the resolution without polling the student population because he wanted the proposal to inspire the type of conversation that took place in Wednesday's Senate meeting.
"It came about basically to get students involved and informed," Hernandez said. "I had talked to a fellow senator who wanted to highlight the positive things that Schmidly had been doing rather than the negative things, and he thought this would be a good forum to do so. So we decided to formulate a resolution and to try and highlight the positive things, but for the most part it was to get discussion going."
Other senators were not so confident that the proposed vote was a good idea.
Sen. Gayle Tripp said ASUNM needs to consider the implications before making decisions that can affect the University community.
"I think that we have to decide what role we want to take in this, if at all," Tripp said. "I feel that people are misinformed, and I don't think we need to be trying to take opinions about this to lead people in one direction or another. I think that we should remain an unbiased source for (students) to come and get information and need to really think about if we want to take sides, because I think we are taking an improper role otherwise."
