Following the discussion of a particular Student Government Association platform point involving alcohol, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs Jennifer Jones-Hall has asked her name not be used publicly by any executive board slates in this year’s election.
Nick Wilkey Fusion vice presidential candidate, said during the vice presidential debate on Tuesday that Jones-Hall approved the slate’s platform point to begin the process of having alcohol sales permitted at football games. Jones-Hall said she did not approve the platform point in any manner.
“I do not support this,” Jones-Hall said. “I did not publicly give them the nod. I told them that I thought it is crazy and it wasn’t going to happen.”
When confronted by a senator at Wednesday’s SGA senate meeting, Wilkey said he didn’t understand why Jones-Hall denied her approval.
“I did talk to her, I don’t know why she came out and said she was against it,” Wilkey said. “But we had a 15-minute conversation where she gave us the nod.”
Jones-Hall said if she had been present at any event where her name and permitting alcohol sales at football games were in the same sentence, she would have immediately confronted Fusion and corrected the statement.
A representative from Ball State’s athletic department could not be reached for comment about the platform point by the Daily News on Friday afternoon.
She said the next day she received an email from Fusion campaign manager Kayleigh Mohler to apologize for the misunderstanding. Wilkey said in a statement sent to the Daily News that Jones-Hall raised some concern with the proposal of selling alcohol to boost attendance at athletic events.
“After explaining the details to her, her response, in my eyes, indicated to me that she thought it would take a lot of work, but was not impossible to achieve this platform point,” Wilkey said in the statement.
Wilkey said he did not intend to imply that Jones-Hall was “excited and supported [the] platform point.”
“I only meant to clarify that I had indeed talked to school officials about our platform points, because that was the question asked of me,” he said.
Jones-Hall said the 15-minute conversation Wilkey referred to was an informal meeting on a bench outside of Teachers College following the Elections Open Forum on Jan. 29.
Jones-Hall said that was the only conversation she had discussing Fusion’s platform points before they were officially nominated on Feb. 4. Cardinal United and Spark both met with Jones-Hall formally to discuss their platform points and to see her concerns.
Mohler said Wilkey independently spoke with Jones-Hall because they kept candidates spread out to talk to different people about different platform points.
When she told Wilkey that she didn’t know of any university in the United States that permitted alcohol sales at football games, Wilkey said West Virginia University does.
“I can understand if you’re in the NFL and that kind of thing, but it’s a risky behavior,” Jones-Hall said. “It makes me sad to think that that’s why this slate wants [this platform point is] how to get students to football games is to sell them alcohol. That’s a sad statement to me.”
Wilkey said his slate will focus on other ways of boosting attendance at athletic events.
“If elected, we still will work with the athletics department to make the necessary steps to begin this long process, but until that time, we will continue to focus on our main platform point of boosting athletic event attendance,” he said.
