RUTHFULLY YOURS

Altheia Richardson, Clemson’s director of the Gantt Multicultural Center, thought she had a heck of an idea when she recently stepped in front of the Clemson Undergraduate Student Government (CUSG) Senate: require that all future student candidates take an ideological poll test.

Yes, really.

She proposed that the body adopt an “intercultural competency” exam which students must pass prior to announcing their candidacies:

The “intercultural competency” test requirement for Student Government candidates who wish to run for office was just one of the ideas Altheia Richardson, Clemson’s Director of the Gantt Multicultural Center, proposed in a recent presentation to Clemson Undergraduate Student Government (CUSG) Senate. As an alternative, Richardson also suggested group training for CUSG members once elected.

“So when it comes to this whole idea of intercultural competence, what would it look like to have a standard for if you’re going to be elected as an officer, or hold a seat within CUSG, that you have to demonstrate that you have a certain level of intercultural competence, before you’re allowed to take that office, or that seat,” Richardson stated, according to CUSG Senate’s public livestream.

When asked by one CUSG senator to elaborate on “the standard for intercultural competency,” Richardson responded that “it could be training, workshops, things like that. It could look very different, but it was just a suggestion that I made to some of the folks that came to me.”

In a follow-up question, the senator asked whether Richardson was “implying that if there’s a threshold that people who have been elected democratically to this body, are then not allowed to serve those peers, because of a certain level they don’t reach in certain areas.”

“Well, it could happen before the democratic election process,” she answered. “If that is set by your Elections Board as a standard, then if you’re vetting the candidates who are running, then it can happen even before the democratic process takes place.”