BLR blurs lines of ethics

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Total world domination

After editorializing recently about insignificant state and national political gunk, it’s time to bring it back down to Earth here at good old Cal State Long Beach.

The recent Beach Legacy Referendum that was put out for a campuswide vote -- and failed -- brought student campaign ethics under the microscope.

Probably the most disturbing part of the BLR blur was that it wasn’t a binding vote; it was merely to test how students might feel if they were slapped with a new fee for athletics goodies, as we learned by perusing California State University Executive Order 1034.

Regardless that the campus community overwhelmingly voted the BLR down, CSULB President F. King Alexander holds the power to impose the fee anyway. What it boils down to is an administrative power play, manipulated largely by a few insiders. There were a few suspected dungeon masters in this conspiracy.

Any student in their right mind should be pissed that the thing was treated like some winner-take-all Obama/McCain-Sarah “America’s favorite MILF” Palin campaign when the BLR was merely a survey.

This issue was essentially relegated to guerilla warfare. The Athletics Department was told, “There are no rules” and fought a no-holds barred battle accordingly. They took off the gloves and boxed bare-knuckle style.

Some of the chicanery included turning rowdy student athletes loose in the dorms pestering sleeping students in the middle of mid-term exams, celebrating victory while the election was still in process and punking students into voting ‘yes’ at the makeshift “unofficial voting” booths set up in the CSULB Pyramid.

I had tried to warn them of the implications in both editorial and signed opinion that we were putting our campus soul at risk.

There were reliable reports about swimming coaches canceling scheduled classes and walking students to the Walter Pyramid to vote.

In the end, however, the campus may have deteriorated a great deal of its essence. When ethics and fair play are overshadowed by the need to win at any cost, the money becomes secondary to benevolence.

In the arena of applied ethics, the entire CSULB community lost.

The death knell to BLR? Hardly, me thinks!!!
Enjoy the video of my homie, Tiffany Rider.