THE ISSUE: The Student Government Association will hold an open forum on Nov. 12 to hear student questions surrounding a new priority registration system that will be enacted for this fall’s registration. The new policy limits students to enrolling for only 16 hours on their priority registration day, excluding seniors and graduate students. Students may then add an additional three credit hours on their normal registration day.

OUR STANCE: Though SGA is now dealing with the issue, it has already failed to represent its students. With registration rapidly approaching, SGA has missed an opportunity to properly represent the student body on an exclusively student issue at an SGA meeting.

At its root, SGA has one job—to represent the students of WKU.

On Sept. 10, it failed in three main ways.

The University Senate approved a new policy to restrict the number of hours students can sign up for the day of their priority registration. This senate includes Mark Reeves, the SGA representative to the University Executive Senate Committee and SGA’s executive vice president, who voted to pass the policy.

First, SGA overlooked a measure it should have questioned or, at the very least, discussed.

Someone, anyone, ought to have questioned Reeves when he mentioned the new priority registration policy in his review that day of ongoing University Senate actions. No one did.

Second, Reeves ought to have elaborated on the policy itself instead of glancing over the subject because he saw the measure as a good idea.

Third, Reeves should not have decided upon a measure that represented his beliefs over and above the student body’s.

To say that even a simple majority of the student body definitely feels that the new priority registration policy is wrong would be a misrepresentation of the facts.

The truth is, we don’t know how students feel about this measure. No one does because SGA didn’t take the time on Sept. 10 or since then to find out.

However, it is not the Herald’s responsibility to represent WKU students and to know how they feel about certain university policy changes.

It’s SGA’s.

We just enjoy telling you guys about them.

While the Herald did incorrectly state in its last editorial that students with priority registration would be limited to 16 credit hours, the entire basis of our Oct. 22 was about the injustice of the priority registration changes for current students.

We mentioned issues such as the unfairness of denying students the promises they were given when they decided to enroll at WKU as well as the complications this measure might create for students who might be triple majoring and require the full 19 hours of priority registration.

But when Reeves wrote a letter to the editor with Gordon Emslie, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs, the duo merely capitalized on our oversight instead of addressing the issues we brought forth.

All of those issues remain.

And we’re still waiting for answers on how this new registration is fair to those students.

Though they might come on Nov. 12, all those answers can ever truly be are excuses for a system that is already in place.

This editorial represents the majority of the herald’s 9-member editorial board.