The constitution remains unratified after three years — what does that say about Student Government Association?
For three years, the University of Tulsa’s Student Government Association has been working on a new constitution — three years. Current seniors have heard about the changing SGA constitution since their freshman year; about as long as they have known about SGA itself. Senior political science major Alea Vaccarella remembers first hearing about it during her freshman year. She remembers hearing “that they were working on it and changing it,” and more importantly, “that the process was going nowhere.”
Three years later, her assessment still holds up. The SGA constitution has become synonymous with the question of what SGA’s purpose is. At some point, a constitution stops being a project and starts becoming a punchline. Junior SGA Apartment Senator and Senate Parliamentarian Anderson Bell first learned about the constitution before his time at TU. While visiting the university over the summer, Bell went to a senate meeting where “they were approving the Constitution that we’re still working out the details for to this day.”
That visit was in the summer of 2024, a point at which the constitution had already been in the works for months. During the 2024-25 academic year, the constitution underwent a series of revisions and debate. For any student government, deliberation is necessary. Years of it, however, start to look less like deliberation and more like dysfunction. “Week after week … people would be changing it on the floor, and then we would revert those changes the next week,” Bell said. “So, we had to start the process all over again, probably about three times.”
There were minor errors to correct. There were disagreements over language. There were procedural hurdles, but eventually, the constitution passed at the end of the spring 2025 semester. Senior SGA Transfer Student Senator Ella Hampton explains that there was a delay between the Michael Combs and Kadee Jo Ransom administrations before the constitution was sent to the Board of Trustees. Once it was, the board rejected the draft and sent it back during the 2025-26 academic year. Afterwards, a group of senators worked with the General Counsel of the University to edit the constitution to comply with the Board of Trustees requirements.
There are some legitimate reasons for this delay. Bell understood that the board had legal obligations to follow. “They have to follow federal law … so a lot of it was staying in compliance with that.” Still, he found the process frustrating. “I wish there was more of a line of dialogue between SGA and the Board of Trustees … because I would like to be able to actually form my opinion on the document that’s before us and not just be told, ‘you have to vote yes on it.’”
This creates an awkward situation for SGA; a body that is supposed to represent students must now have its governing document survive approval from the institution above it. This tension explains some of the delay, but not all of it. Bell’s biggest criticism is not that SGA has spent too much time dealing with the board, but rather that SGA has spent so much time dealing with itself. Today, only a few original authors remain in the Senate, and Bell thinks that SGA should move on from this constitution. “At this point, we need to just start all over on drafting a new constitution,” he said. “If we want a constitution that best fits the students … we ought to just have a constitutional convention,” he said. “Just lock ourselves in a room for a day and just get it done.”
That may sound absurd, but after three years, absurdity is part of the point. This fall, the same constitution was back on the Senate floor. Some senators simply want it to pass rather than continue any revisions. “We spent several meetings trying to pass it. There was one meeting where we suspended all the rules…to try and pass it,” says Hampton. On Tuesday, Sept. 15, SGA approved its constitution on its first vote. Now it must pass again through SGA with a two-thirds majority, before going to the student body. The question is, will it be ratified this time, and if it is, what will SGA do next?
The problem is not just that the constitution is unfinished, but how students have come to view SGA because of it. When asked how the three-year process reflects on the association, Bell responded, “I think really poorly.” Vaccarella said that when she hears about SGA, it is often “with some sort of drama attached to it.” She does not find the lack of progress surprising. “I’ve heard bits and pieces about it since then, but honestly… there’s been no evolution. It just feels so stagnant every time I hear about it.” Concerningly, when asked whether she feels represented by SGA, her answer was an immediate no. SGA can argue that constitution revisions are complicated, it can point to the Board of Trustees, it can explain parliamentary procedures, supermajorities and general counsel, and all of those things may be true, but students outside of the government experience none of those things directly. They experience whether their concerns are addressed. They experience whether student organizations receive support. They experience an SGA that appears to be doing nothing but working on an endless constitution.
Vaccarella would rather see SGA move forward with issues that directly affect students than remain stuck on a document that has already consumed years. She said that it feels like SGA is “just kind of sitting in limbo and then nothing else happening outside of it.” Bell made essentially the same argument from inside SGA. He said that the organization should focus more on student organizations, campus initiatives and the work done through its committees. “Our time could be better spent on things like that,” he said.
There is an irony to this: a constitution is supposed to establish how a government functions, but after three years, TU’s SGA constitution has instead caused many to question whether the government functions at all. Maybe the constitution will finally pass this time. Maybe students will approve of it. Maybe the Board of Trustees will sign off and the entire saga will finally end, but if SGA wants students to care about what happens within its meetings, passing the constitution cannot be the end of the story. It must mark the start of an SGA that is intent on proving that there is something worth paying attention to.
