The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry – especially in GUSA election season.

This afternoon Student Association President Kelley Hampton (SFS ’05) and Vice President Luis Torres (COL ’05) will present to an informal gathering of their peers, their plan to reform the student association.

According to Hampton, the project has been in the works since last summer when she began to examine both the flaws of the association and methods proposed in the past to remedy them.

“We don’t really have a consolidated voice,” she said speaking for GUSA. “What voice we do have has become very weak. And it becomes something that can be pushed over very easily.”

GUSA has been suffering, according to students both involved and uninvolved with the association, from a legitimacy crisis since its founding in the 1980s – a crisis aggravated by Hampton and Torres’ own tumultuous election nearly a year ago. This was a two-month long saga during which they were initially disqualified for excessive campaign violations, despite winning the most votes, leading to a lengthy legal and political battle.

There are few who doubt that some sort of reform is long overdue. Calls for change have been around nearly since the inception of the association, but have seemingly grown louder in the past half decade.

Most of the discussions have focused on The Yard, the now-defunct student government association that existed at Georgetown through 1968. While students currently elect four representatives for each class, under The Yard, various student groups and organizations on campus each send a representative instead.

Jack Ternan (COL ’04), a former GUSA Assembly chair, proposed a revival of The Yard in December 2000. In December 2003, Pravin Rajan (SFS ’07), then a freshmen class representative, reopened the issue.

Then, in 2001, a referendum was held on Ternan’s proposal. The proposition failed to win a majority of student support and continues to be controversial, raising eyebrows among students. any students associate The Yard with the regimented atmosphere of a pre-1970s Georgetown.

Hampton said that is exactly what she fears.

“As soon as you mention The Yard, people go nuts,” Hampton said. Much of the constitution she will propose is inspired by the failed 2001 version.

Moreover, this is no ordinary month on the GUSA calendar – executive candidates were announced Wednesday and the election will be held Feb. 16.

The issue will undoubtedly be launched to the forefront of the campaign.

Calls of opposition are already emerging. Sam Hill (SFS ’05), the director of student relations on Hampton’s executive cabinet and a senior class representative on the GUSA Assembly, was particularly surprised by the content and timing of the proposal.

“The Yard works by divide and conquer,” he said. “But it’s the students who are being conquered.”

Hill perceived unnecessary secrecy in writing the new constitution. Hampton, however, claims the whole process is intended to make GUSA more inclusive, not less.

Regardless of whether a new constitution in fact does emerge from this process or not, the coming weeks will be a definitive moment in the student association’s history and regardless of the true intentions of both sides in the dispute, timing and circumstance make the appearance of intrigue and impropriety inevitable.

And while they bicker over bureaucracy, student government at Georgetown stands at the verge of yet another crisis.