Letter to the editor

While reading the candidate info for yesterday’s ASPSU election I thought several names sounded familiar but I couldn’t quite place them. Later I found that those names belonged to people on the staff of the Portland Spectator, people such as Shahriyar Smith, Lawrence Smith, Nathan Sackett, Michael Fuller, Justice MacPherson and Douglas Rohde. Yet none of these individuals mentioned their involvement with this publication. Why was that? Were they so ashamed of their work at the Spectator that they wanted to conceal it from the voting public?

I realize that these individuals probably did not break any rules by concealing their relationship with a student-funded politically oriented newspaper but it does seem to represent a lapse of both journalistic and political ethics. The election is over and several of these candidates survived the grueling race and will serve us all as ASPSU senators. I can only hope that their tenure as senators is not characterized by the lack of transparency in democracy that was demonstrated in their candidate biographies.

Joshua Bass, post-bac, sociology