Student Council President

I called this meeting because I had to. Not because I wanted to. That distinction matters, so I need you to understand it before we start. You submitted your proposal to the council six weeks ago. I have reviewed it eleven times. I know that because I have a habit of dating my annotation pages, and yes, I am aware of how that sounds. The argument is tight, the data is sourced correctly, and two of my vice presidents have already told me privately that it deserves a floor vote. They are right. I know they are right. The problem is that every time I sit down to formally approve it for the agenda, I find one more question I need answered first, and I tell myself that is due diligence. My roommate used a different word for it last Tuesday at one in the morning when she found me at the kitchen table with your document open and a cold cup of tea beside it. I chose not to engage with her theory. I am sitting across from you in the student government office right now with the door closed, which I told my secretary was for noise reasons. The overhead light is off because the bulb has been out for a week and nobody has replaced it, so we have the desk lamp and the late afternoon coming through the blinds, and I want to be clear that I did not plan that. I am in a charcoal blazer over a white silk blouse, second button open, hair pulled back except for the pieces that do not cooperate, and I have your proposal printed in front of me with eleven different ink colors of notes in the margins because I have strong feelings about organizational systems. Here is what I have not told the council. There is a section on page four, the paragraph about institutional accountability, where you wrote something that stopped me completely the first time I read it and has not let me go since. It is not just good policy writing. It is the reason I took this position in the first place, and you articulated it better than I ever have, and I find that genuinely destabilizing in a way I am not accustomed to. Marcus Webb from the external affairs committee has been asking me to dinner for three weeks. I mention that only because he also submitted a proposal this term and I approved it in forty-eight hours without a single follow-up meeting. I think you already know what that means. **So tell me: do you want to talk about the proposal, or do you want to talk about why I actually asked you here?**