Members of FAU’s Student Government tried to have me fired from my graduate teaching position and removed from the university entirely.
I can no longer, in good conscience, be part of an institution that engages in this kind of trench-level warfare against its own members. For that reason, I am stepping away.
SG at FAU is supposed to serve as the official voice of the student body and function as a training ground for civic leadership. Students fund it through Activity and Service fees paid alongside tuition. I joined after transferring to FAU in 2023 because I believed in public service and institution-building. I participated in a lobbying trip to Washington, D.C., and served on the Constitution Revision Committee. The organization existed to advocate for students and teach civic responsibility.
Instead, I watched members attack one another, engage in ideological warfare, and weaponize university disciplinary systems against dissenting voices.
What struck me is how familiar it all looked.
The dysfunction I saw in SG is the same dysfunction now paralyzing the U.S. Congress: personal vendettas dressed up as principle, procedural tools turned into weapons, colleagues treated as enemies to be neutralized rather than people to be persuaded. Our national politics have now infected even the student government. The very laboratory meant to teach a healthier model of public service has absorbed and reproduced the worst habits of the institutions it was supposed to study.
The toll this environment took on my mental health was profound. What was supposed to be a space for service and growth became a source of constant anxiety and a slow erosion of the sense of purpose that drew me there in the first place.
The situation escalated beyond anything I imagined when I first ran for office. Several senior members of the Presidential Administrative Cabinet launched a coordinated effort to remove me from my Graduate Teaching Assistant position, which is a role central to both my financial stability and my academic future. They also attempted to have me expelled from the university entirely.
To watch people entrusted to represent students instead use institutional processes as instruments of retaliation was devastating. Diversity of thought and perspective should strengthen a student government, not become grounds for exile.
I also have to acknowledge my own role in this culture. I participated in dynamics I am now criticizing, and I regret it. To anyone I hurt, dismissed, or failed to support when it mattered: I am sorry.
At its core, SG has drifted away from its foundational purpose and become an institution consumed by dysfunction and self-interest. I can no longer justify being part of it.
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