Just as the Florida Blue Key political machine has been corrupting Student Government for many years, the Independent Student Coalition has been a force for positive reform at the University of Florida for a long time.
The effort began when a group of independent senate candidates, seeing the need to organize, ran informally in 1989 as the Independent Coalition. After winning his senate seat, Charles Grapski along with other independents sought to help students become involved and informed in what is happening on campus, with Student Government in particular.
In 1990, the Coalition of Concerned Students was founded with the goal of pushing for SG reform. In 1993, the informal Indepent Coalition merged with the Coalition for Concerned Students to form the Independent Student Coaliton. As founders, Charles Grapski and Todd Underhill led a campaign every fall and worked with various independent candidacies during Spring elections.
Since that time, the Independent Student Coalition has grown a great deal. Because of the magnitude of the subjects tackled by the organization it has become necessary to found other groups within the parent organication of ISC.
The Independent Majority was created as a group whose sole purpose is to run candidates in senate elections. The Independent Majority is currently the minority part in student senate.
In order to address the range of attacks that have come recently against higher education, SOS, Save Our Schools, was founded. SOS has held speak-outs, attended meetings of the Legislature, and produced materials to inform the student body about such problems as tuition increases and financial aid cuts. There are hundreds of members of SOS.
More recently, the Independent Student Coalition created the Committee for Student Sovereignty. Feeling that all efforts to change the problems with Student Government through the normal election process have proved fruitless, the Committee recently proposed "the Initiative of the Student Body of the University of Florida".
The most recent project of the Independent Student Coalition is the newspaper, the Independent Voice. Members sincerely hope that it will provide valuable information to empower the students of the University of Florida with real knowledge.
The Independent Student Coalition welcomes all students, faculty, and citizens in general to participate and can be contacted at P.O. Box 14171 or reached at (352) 491-9336.