The accomplishments of LSU’s Student Government are admirable in the face of the meager $2.20 fee charged to every student to fund them. 

Just this semester, SG has worked to ensure that every student now has access to Adobe Creative Cloud, filled with crucial programs like Photoshop and InDesign. They’ve also worked hard to ensure that students are registered to vote in our state and local elections. 

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SG has provided our campus with many amenities and improvements, and they should be commended for that.

But it’s also disappointing that in our university’s most trying times, there’s been no unified voice from SG to defend the core values necessary for a healthy liberal democracy. 

The Student Senate did its job to commend professor Robert Mann for his service to LSU and call for the defense of free speech and academic tenure. Student Body President Anna Catherine Strong chose to not support this resolution, perhaps in fear of earning Gov.-elect Jeff Landry’s ire. 

Cooperation with the incoming governor should always be welcomed. But that cooperation shouldn’t come at the cost of the interests of our university. With Strong’s veto of a Student Senate resolution denouncing Landry’s skipping at a crucial gubernatorial forum in favor of a partisan event with Donald Trump Jr. and the absence of her signature on student Sen. Corbitt Driskell’s resolution, I feel she’s abandoned the need to represent the interests of the student body and provide an independent voice. 

She didn’t support the resolutions, because she felt both had “political” language. Indeed, she’s correct. However, the resolutions were created to defend the rights of students and faculty to speak without intimidation and ensure that politicians understand they must be held accountable.

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As an outside observer, I’ll never know what happens behind the scenes in SG. Perhaps Strong and those who advised her felt it was advantageous to stay silent in the face of the overwhelming force of the incoming Landry administration.

However, the campus community and future students at LSU will feel the repercussions.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has destroyed tenure and academic freedom of speech. Last year, DeSantis signed a bill limiting tenure, forcing faculty to go through a review by their university’s board of trustees every five years. 

DeSantis claimed tenure has created “intellectual orthodoxy” that shuts out those with “dissenting” views and made faculty less effective. Academic freedom in Florida is non-existent, demonstrated by DeSantis’ hostile takeover of the New College of Florida, where he replaced the board of supervisors and president with his lackeys.

And last month, DeSantis banned pro-Palestinian student organizations in Floridian universities. The State University System of Florida ordered that the student chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine had to be dismantled because of what it called their “harmful support for terrorist groups [such as Hamas].” 

Regardless of what your opinion on the conflict between Israel and Palestine is, it’s unacceptable that DeSantis intervened to silence the voices of students. 

These dangerous acts could happen here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many students and faculty at LSU feel the same. Freedom of speech and tenure are crucial to the maintenance of academic excellence. 

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We must maintain a marketplace of ideas in our university. Republicans are incorrect in assessing universities as “indoctrination” camps. They’re a place where every student can mold themselves into well-rounded thinkers by absorbing ideas from every political tradition.

I want to hope that our educational freedoms won’t be threatened. But with his absence at the gubernatorial forum and his call for “disciplining” professor Mann, I’ll take Landry at his word. 

Now is not the time to hope for a better future with Landry. It’s the time to fight for it. If he has any idea of destroying the heart of intellectual thought and progress in this state by threatening tenure and freedom of speech, he should have to do it with robust resistance from the student body and faculty.

Although President Strong didn’t sign the resolution supporting Mann and academic freedom, it still went into effect. Her signature, however, would’ve been a powerful message that there’s a unified SG that will defend student and faculty academic freedoms.

Nathaniel Dela Peña is a 20-year-old political science and history senior from Alexandria.