RE: UAB National Alumni Society - Men's Basketball Alumni Day
FWIW - the NAS is not one person, or one attitude, or one approach. It is everyone in the NAS. If you leave because you don't like it, you just move the needle a little bit in the direction you don't want it to move.
During the crisis there were people in the NAS and on the board who were thoroughly pissed by what happened... but there were others who just didn't get it, don't get sports in general, don't get football, don't get southern culture about football, etc. There were probably even some that agreed with what happened or were at best apathetic.
What publicly comes out of the NAS is filtered through that diversity of viewpoints/positions as well as political posturing. I think the desires of those angry about what happened, however, were eventually carried out.
The NAS leadership had to 1) represent everyone, 2) at least appear objective to the administration to keep the embassy open, and 3) use the political climate/opportunity to help UAB as best as they knew how. I know some will argue that there were people who were more interested in helping themselves. That may be true, but I would argue that is true of almost any political situation.
It wasn't exactly pretty, but if you recall a few amazing things came from the NAS during all that happened.... I think it was probably a group of former NAS presidents that suggested to Watts that a re-evaluation would be prudent. The conditional no confidence vote was weird, but Watts had just announced the re-eval. It should have been worded better, but they could not slam the door the president just opened. The NAS eventually requested that Watts resign. The president of the NAS made the president of the UA NAS seem silly with the latter's request the keep politics out of the BOT - now go email your senator message. LOL! They got in person meetings with the BOT (thanks to the political climate created by the protests of others). It takes some people making a ruckus for that to happen, but you can't have the NAS leadership making the ruckus themselves - otherwise, again, you are slamming a door. The NAS then pledged a significant amount to the football campaign.
So... in the end, I think it did fairly well.
Regarding the change in the bylaws... that was handled poorly. Then I think they realized that and halfway backed off.
From the NAS perspective, they were worried that their meeting, which is normally a lighted attended formality of announcing new members, would become a bashing session for their volunteers to knock them down while hyping the "FreeUAB" candidate. Also, I think that there was some worry that they, who have been doing this for years, raising scholarship money, begging people to come to games, etc., while no one else seemed to care all that much, would get booted out via a rather bizarre set of voting rules in the bylaws that no one cared to notice before.
In the end, that was all moot. There were two write-in slots, the names everyone should write in were widely distributed. When the votes where counted, the write-ins were no where close to taking those two seats. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I was at the meeting where the results were announced. Enough info was given that you could do the math, and I looked at the guy next to me and we agreed that for as much noise as people were making, they stunk at putting an envelope in the mail. If you can't take two seats via write in, you aren't going to coup de tat the whole board.
(This post was last modified: 12-10-2015 03:14 PM by legalblazer.)
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UAB National Alumni Society - Men's Basketball Alumni Day
UAB National Alumni Society - Men's Basketball Alumni Day 
