Unite Party Recordings: Why They Matter

By Travis Pillow

By now a lot of people have read about the recordings of a Unite Party meeting, reported in the Gainesville Sun and the Alligator yesterday. Some people are disgusted. Others are questioning whether the recordings were made legally. Many students seem to be asking, So what?

Of course Greek students band together to try and steer Student Government to their own ends. It happens on campuses all over the country – especially in the South. As they say themselves in the transcript, they have the people, the resources, and the influence over their brothers and sisters to dominate elections. And of course they would spew all kinds of venom about their opponents during a halftime election pep talk. So why does any of this matter?

Some people complain that Greek students enjoy special privileges that they don’t deserve – extra parking, legacy access to plum gigs like head of the student traffic and honor courts, block seating at football games. But that stuff all comes at a price that includes going through pledgeship and paying dues. Anyway, there’s not much student government would ever do about it. As Student Alliance leader Jonathan Ossip put it, “The only things we’d have the power to take away are the lines on some of their resumes.”

But various voices in the tapes are hating on God Damn Independents – those of us who chose not to wear Greek letters – and accusing the Student Alliance of seeking to mount a massive anti-Greek conspiracy. As one shrill unidentified female put it:

Student Alliance, this is ridiculous, these people don’t have friends. Like you think I’m kidding, these guys don’t have friends. It’s not funny…

…They want everything gone for us. It’s not a joke, they want to see every letter that we have stripped away from us. They don’t want us to live the life that we have. I’m being serious, guys, like, you may not realize this now, you may not realize the impact of these elections, but this can alter every single way that we live.

Or as a belligerent unidentified male said later:

But tomorrow, when the results come out, and we lose, we’re going to be like, “Holy shit, we just lost our way of life.” And everyone is going to freak out and everything before you is gonna fall apart …You guys should be going to be tonight freaking out. I, I ,I don’t even know if I can sleep tonight, like, I’m shaking right now.

This kind of hateful nonsense is part of what motivated the anonymous tipster to hand over the recordings in the first place. It wouldn’t be surprising if it also drove many Greeks to vote for the Student Alliance, which never said anything like this about the Unite Party base, even behind closed doors. Most people – Greek or not – don’t see things this way. We don’t hate or fear people just because they hang out in different circles some of the time.

While the people in these recordings tried to rally the troops with scare tactics and stereotypes, their opponents in the Student Alliance were reaching out to strangers and explaining how SG could make their UF experience better.

It’s worth pointing out that this system is bad for most Greeks as well as GDIs. Most of members of fraternities and sororities don’t benefit at all, but they do have to deal with extreme coercion, which received praise during the meeting:

Kara Olesky was not happy to hear tapes that implicated her sorority, DPhiE, in withholding food from pledges.

DPhiE, I know you had your baby pledge class that they couldn’t eat until they went and voted. [Giggles] That’s amazing, that’s what you need to do. So I applaud you all for doing that.

Jordan Johnson told the Alligator that the [giggles] are evidence that the speaker was joking, though mood on the rest of the tapes is anything but jocular.

There’s also evidence of collusion between the Unite Party and the supervisor of elections, who apparently promised to change the color of “I Voted” stickers midway through the election:

…tomorrow, the [I Voted] stickers will be changing. They’re gonna be a different color, I’m telling you that right now. So you try and fuck with us, and you try and change the stickers, or keep the same ones and put them on there, we’re going to know.

Someone had stolen a role of stickers. It wasn’t clear whose side they were on (though it’s likely it was someone from a Unite organization looking to get their buddies out of having to trek to the polls). Greek houses, as well as other organizations like the Black Student Union, rely on the stickers to police their members and force them to vote. That’s why handing out fake stickers is considered a campaign violation. It’s also why last Fall, in voting down a measure to replace the stickers with stamps to save money,

Unite Party Sen. Josh Roberts, who represents the college of agriculture, questioned how the bill would help improve the election process. He said stickers are a matter of American pride.

The various organizations that make up the Unite Party (not all of them Greek) comprise the feeding system for Florida Blue Key, a “leadership honorary” that once dominated Florida politics (with famous alums from Bob Graham to Bill Nelson). Its clout has waned in recent years. Its political machine no longer runs Tallahassee, and the third floor of the Reitz Union is its last bastion. Both Andrew Guglielmo and current SG President Jordan Johnson, who star in the tapes, as well as all but a handful of UF’s past student leaders, are FBK members.

Why is this man not smiling?

There is always at least one FBK party. Right now it’s Unite (though it will probably change after this firestorm). Before that, it was the Gator Party, and before that, the Swamp Party. In the 1990s it was called the FOCUS party, an acronym for Fuck Off Charlie, U Suck. Charlie Grapski, that is, who successfully sued the organization for defamation and exposed their corrupt system in the process. The system has changed somewhat, but the real reason these tapes matter is that they prove that the FBK machine is still with us. The Fine Print will be making the Grapski documents public before we leave for Spring Break. We’re hoping the administration is willing to investigate, and bring this corrupt system to an end.