Right now, ASMSU, MSU's undergraduate student government, stands as a house divided - literally.

Under the current scheme, ASMSU has the Student Assembly and an Academic Assembly to deal with the off-campus issues such as tailgating and on-campus issues such as tuition, respectively. Some members of ASMSU, such as Brian Forest, have called for a change that would bring ASMSU's two competing bodies together.

The chief problem is that under the current system, there is little incentive to run, and even less to vote for ASMSU representation. On top of the complex system, bureaucratic titles allow student representatives to run unopposed without their undergraduate constituency ever truly knowing what or who they're voting for.

Forest and his supporters in ASMSU are advocating a one-body system with two specialized committees to handle the jobs formerly done by the two separate bodies. Unlike ASMSU's current system, only one vote would be taken after the committees make a recommendation. The changes would also create a president to oversee legislation. The pioneering motive behind Forest's ideas is to give ASMSU the legitimacy it sorely lacks and desperately needs.

Those on the other side of the fence, such as ASMSU Student Assembly Chairperson Andrew Schepers, favor working within the existing system to improve it from the inside. The two-party system allows ASMSU to focus both on city issues and campus issues with a two-pronged approach.

Structural changes and mergers between colleges have some people at ASMSU worried about losing representation, so keeping the old system might retain student representation for ASMSU, Schepers said.

Here's what it comes down to: ASMSU needs to simplify the process of student government. We agree with Forest when he said that no one would vote for a system they don't understand because it's proven 'U' don't. Undergraduate students usually turn out in low numbers to elect their own student government. Turnout floats between 3 or 4 percent, depending on the year.

ASMSU is a creaky patchwork, Frankenstein's monster of bureaucracy, slapped together in 1991 in the image of reform, but without the record to suggest it ever happened. Tradition, in the face of obvious problems, should not keep any governmental body from needed reform at the expense of legitimacy.

We feel that legitimacy will come from a revived interest in reinventing the student government wheel at MSU. The resources are there, the need for reform is there and the spirit to actually make ASMSU a household name are unilateral ideals.

Give MSU's undergraduate population a visible, accessible unicameral governing body. If ASMSU isn't holding itself accountable for its shortcomings, students, university and city officials can't be expected to. A system of government that successfully devotes itself to democracy, legitimacy and representation will never find itself absent of those same qualities.

That's not too much to ask.