One Year Later: A Look Back at What Student Government Delivered

When Courtney Tkacs took office in March 2025, she carried with her a tidy slogan — “keeping students first” — and a platform built on three pillars: quality academics and advising, improved campus spaces and student experience, and deeper student engagement. She had spent the previous year as vice president under Patton Byars, which meant she knew how the machinery worked. She knew which levers to pull and which offices to call. She knew, better than most incoming presidents, how wide the gap tends to be between what you promise on Greene Street and what you actually deliver from the second floor of the Russell House.

With roughly a month left before her successor takes the oath, we decided to do something Student Government rarely invites and even more rarely survives — a straightforward audit. Not of the budget — though we will get to that disaster — but of the promises themselves. What did Tkacs say she would do? What did she actually do? And where the two diverge, what happened in the space between?

The answer, it turns out, involves an impeachment crisis that consumed the first month of the academic year, a funding board that burned through its entire budget before Christmas, a senate where nearly half the members never signed a single piece of legislation, and a handful of genuine accomplishments that deserve honest credit even as they sit in the shadow of everything else.

The Election That Started Sideways

Tkacs did not enter office on stable footing. Her election was marred by fraud allegations serious enough that the Constitutional Council ruled there was “sufficient evidence of election fraud” related to a TikTok post by a campaign member. The results were delayed and legitimacy questions surrounding the elections lingered. She beat David Henao and Bradley Gittens, and Jordan Richardson was elected as her vice president, but the cloud of controversy was baked into the administration from day one.

It is worth noting what Henao said during the campaign, because it aged remarkably well. “Every year we have the basic message that we’re going to fix parking,” he told SGTV. “But if you ask the students if any of these things have improved, they’ll tell you — what is student government, and what are they doing?” That question — what are they doing — would come to define the Tkacs term far more than any policy initiative.

Her colleague, Speaker Maura Hamilton, offered what in retrospect reads like a thesis statement for the entire administration: “One of my biggest campaign promises is just being realistic with students. I don’t want to sit here and make crazy promises.” Realistic, as it turned out, meant something closer to minimal.

Travel Tuesdays: The Promise That Shape-Shifted

Of all Tkacs’s campaign promises, Travel Tuesdays was among the most specific and the most appealing. The pitch was straightforward: a bus system that would take students — especially freshmen without cars — to Target, Trader Joe’s, Publix, and Food Lion around Columbia. It was the kind of tangible, practical idea that makes students think their government might actually understand their lives.

When Tkacs brought the concept to Brian Favela, the university’s Director of Parking and Transportation, it morphed into something entirely different. Rather than a free shuttle to grocery stores, the administration landed on a partnership with Zipcar, the car-sharing service. The deal launched September 8, 2025, placing ten vehicles across five campus locations. Although memberships were free for the 2025-2026 academic year, the cars themselves cost 15-17 dollars per hour to rent.

In fairness, this is an actual partnership that provides an actual service, but it is not what students were promised. Free transportation to Target is fundamentally different from a seventeen-dollar-an-hour car rental, and the students who most needed Travel Tuesdays — the ones without cars and, often, without much disposable income — are precisely the students least likely to pay hourly rental fees to drive themselves to Food Lion. The Zipcar partnership is a legitimate accomplishment, but calling it a fulfilled promise is a stretch.

Verdict: Partially delivered, substantially altered. The students who needed it most were priced out of the replacement.

The Late-Night Shuttle: A Genuine Win, Mostly Inherited

The late-night shuttle is the clearest success story of the Tkacs administration, although it is not entirely hers to claim. The program was launched under Patton Byars. What Tkacs did was maintain it, and under her watch it grew — ridership climbed from fifty to seventy-five riders per night to roughly one hundred and twenty. It runs Fridays and Saturdays from 8 PM to 3 AM with a budget of $150,000, and TransLoc tracking was added in the fall to let students see where the shuttle was in real time.

A shuttle that doubles its ridership is a shuttle that is meeting a need, and the addition of live tracking was a smart quality-of-life improvement. The Tkacs administration also continued the Uber discount program, offering five- to ten-dollar discounts per football game with a $5,000 allocation supplemented by $13,000 in donations from USCPD, Parking and Transportation, and Student Affairs.

Credit where it is due; these programs work, and keeping them running is not nothing. Tkacs herself said during the campaign, “I want to ensure that every single thing that we implemented this year continues next year.” On the shuttle and Uber fronts, she delivered, but continuing existing programs should be the floor of governance, not the ceiling. It is the equivalent of a restaurant staying open — necessary, but not exactly a reason to celebrate.

Verdict: Delivered. The shuttle grew, the Uber discounts continued, and students are safer for it. This is the administration’s strongest claim.

Advising Reform: The Quiet Disappearance

During the campaign, Tkacs spoke with conviction about what she called a broken advising system. She promised to create an advising committee, launch an “Advice for Advisees” program, and bring advisors to Greene Street for face-to-face feedback sessions where students could tell them, directly, what was and was not working.

None of this appears to have happened. There is no public news coverage of an advising committee being created. There is no record of an “Advice for Advisees” event and there are no reports of advisors appearing on Greene Street. The promise simply vanished — no announcement that it had been modified, no explanation for why it was shelved, no substitute offered in its place. It was there during the campaign, and then it was not.

This is one of the more frustrating failures because advising is a persistent and widespread student complaint. It was a promise that, if executed, would have affected thousands of students across every college. Instead, it joined the long tradition of Student Government campaign planks that dissolve on contact with office.

Verdict: Not delivered. No evidence of any progress.

“Conversations with Courtney”: The Outreach That Nobody Covered

Tkacs promised a program called “Conversations with Courtney,” in which she would visit student organizations to hear directly from members about their needs. The university’s official profile of Tkacs mentions the existence of “SG on the Steps” — described as monthly Greene Street gatherings — and “Let’s Talk Carolina,” an organizational outreach initiative.

While it is possible these events occurred, it is also notable that there was never any public announcement or published article about any of them. There are no attendance figures, student reactions, and no follow-up reporting. When a student body president’s signature outreach initiative generates zero independent media coverage across an entire academic year, one of two things is true: either the events were so small they did not register, or they did not happen in any meaningful way.

While we cannot say definitively that “Conversations with Courtney” never took place, we can confidently say that whatever took place left no discernible footprint on the student experience or the public record.

Verdict: Unclear. Possibly occurred, but no documented impact.

Narcan, Cup Covers, and Angel Shots: Safety in Theory

The nightlife safety platform was one of Tkacs’s more compelling campaign elements. She proposed distributing Narcan and cup covers in nightlife areas and implementing the Angel Shot program — a system where bar patrons who feel unsafe can order a specific drink to discreetly signal staff for help.

What actually materialized was a senate recommendation to include Narcan training in AlcoholEdu, the online course required of all first-year students. That recommendation is non-binding, meaning the university is under no obligation to act on it. There is no evidence that cup covers were distributed anywhere near Five Points or the Vista. There is no evidence that the Angel Shot program was implemented at any Columbia bar.

The gap between “we will put Narcan and cup covers in students’ hands in nightlife areas” and “we passed a non-binding recommendation that first-years watch a Narcan video in their required online course” is the kind of gap that defines this administration’s relationship with its own promises.

Verdict: Mostly not delivered. A non-binding recommendation is not the same as action.

Parking and Mental Health: The Evergreen Failures

Tkacs promised to expand hourly parking into the Bull Street garage, giving students a pay-as-you-go option instead of committing to expensive semester permits. No evidence exists that this happened. The senate did pass a separate recommendation to reduce the overselling of parking permits and to develop a Garnet Gate mobile app, but both were — again — non-binding recommendations addressing a different problem than the one Tkacs campaigned on.

On mental health, Tkacs called three- to four-day counseling wait times “completely unacceptable” and promised to reduce them. She also pledged to continue the mental health excused absence pilot. That pilot, however, was a Byars initiative announced in February 2025, before Tkacs took office. No reporting suggests concrete action was taken to reduce counseling wait times during Tkacs’s term. The promise was made with apparent passion and followed up with indifference.

Verdict: Not delivered on either front. The parking and mental health landscapes look the same as they did a year ago.

The Impeachment Crisis: August-September 2025

Whatever momentum the Tkacs administration might have built over the summer was obliterated on August 20, 2025 — the very first senate meeting of the academic year — when 2 senators filed Articles of Impeachment against nearly the entire Student Government leadership.

The charges were sweeping. Tkacs and Vice President Richardson were accused of deceptive campaigning, specifically the alleged use of a social media account called CockyFanClub that was built before the official campaign period, and election fraud tied to the TikTok post that had already drawn a Constitutional Council finding. Speaker Hamilton faced charges of abuse of office, election interference, tampering with public records, suppression of senatorial speech, and — in a detail almost too specific to be fabricated — cutting down a campaign banner. Treasurer Ashley Reynolds was accused of abuse of authority, unauthorized policy creation, breach of fiscal transparency, and initiating unauthorized audits of student organizations.

The Court of Impeachment dismissed every article against every executive by votes of nine to one. The only person the court recommended for conviction was one of the senators that brought the impeachment charges — on a charge of “Hindering Efficient Progress” — a charge that functionally punished him for filing the impeachment in the first place.

Setting aside whether the original charges had merit, the outcome sent an unmistakable message — the system will protect its own, and if you challenge the people in power, the system will come for you instead. Whether this was justice or retaliation depends on your perspective, but the optics were brutal. A senator raised concerns about executive conduct, and the institution’s response was to put him on trial for raising them.

More practically, the impeachment consumed the first month of the fall semester. While other student governments were passing budgets and launching programs, South Carolina’s was litigating its own legitimacy. That is time and political capital that never came back, and it colored every interaction between the executive branch and the senate for the rest of the year.

The SOFAB Funding Collapse: The Defining Failure

If the impeachment was the Tkacs administration’s most dramatic crisis, the Student Organization Funding Assistance Board debacle was its most consequential. SOFAB was created in March 2025 as part of a restructuring that cut Student Government’s allocation from $340,000 to roughly $185,000, with approximately $120,000 redirected to the new board. The pitch was efficiency — SOFAB would process smaller funding requests faster and with less bureaucracy than the senate’s notoriously cumbersome system.

On that front, it worked — perhaps too well. By September, SOFAB had processed $67,452 across 118 requests. Student Government’s senate, despite sitting on a larger budget, had allocated only $27,649 over the same period. Organizations figured out quickly which door to knock on, and it was not the senate’s.

Then came January 14, 2026, and the announcement that nobody in SG leadership seemed to have seen coming: SOFAB had run out of money entirely. The reason was staggeringly basic — the board failed to split its budget between fall and spring semesters. They spent everything in one term and left nothing for the next.

The fallout was immediate and severe. SOFAB was paused and in the first week of the spring semester alone, Student Government received thirty-seven funding requests from organizations that had been counting on SOFAB money that no longer existed.

This was a failure of the most basic financial management — the kind of mistake that would get a household budget app flagged for review. An administration that campaigned on “keeping students first” created a funding mechanism, let it spend all its money in one semester, and then told hundreds of student organizations in January that the well was dry.

The damage extended beyond the immediate fiscal crisis. As Senator Whisenant wrote in an October 2025 guest column for the Daily Gamecock, the dual-track funding system had already created a perverse dynamic even before SOFAB went broke. The senate’s own funding process had become so cumbersome — requiring “an initial comptroller audit and a risk assessment” before even reaching the treasurer, followed by a Finance Committee review and a full senate vote, a process that could take three weeks and still end in denial — that organizations were simply not applying. A new tiered system awarded only forty to eighty percent of requested funding based on a “color-coded points rubric.”

The combination of a byzantine senate process and a broke SOFAB meant that by spring 2026, student organizations at the University of South Carolina had fewer reliable paths to funding than at virtually any point in recent memory. That is truly a legacy to remember.

A Senate That Legislated in Name Only

But the funding collapse did not happen in a vacuum, it happened within a senate that, by multiple measures, was barely functioning as a legislative body.

In a December 2025 guest column, Whisenant published numbers that should have embarrassed every senator who read them. Forty-eight percent of senators — nearly half the body — produced zero signed legislation during the fall 2025 semester. Of the roughly eighty total bills that were introduced, nearly seventy percent were non-binding recommendations, meaning the university was under no obligation to act on them. The senate was simply making suggestions, and even at that, half its members could not be bothered to suggest anything at all.

The legislation that did pass often had a self-serving quality that reinforced every cynical assumption students already held about their government. The senate created an alumni network exclusively for former Student Government members — not for the student body, not for student organizations, but for themselves. They passed Senate Bill 117-88, which demanded that parking enforcement wait before ticketing ROTC students’ cars, prompting a Daily Gamecock opinion column to call it “building a military of soft, spoiled brats” and noting that the nearest legal parking was a three-minute walk and meters did not require payment until 9 AM.

Meanwhile, as catalogued, the issues students actually cared about — parking shortages that affected everyone, deteriorating housing conditions, a course registration system that routinely failed under load, and the increasingly unreliable organization funding process — went largely unaddressed. The senate was not ignoring these problems because they were unsolvable. It was ignoring them because solving them would require confronting university administrators with demands rather than suggestions, and non-binding recommendations are easier to pass and less likely to generate friction.

A column published in April 2025 had argued that the entire student organization funding system was structurally broken — that it had been broken, in various forms, since 1918 — and that the only real solution was to hand the process to professional staff rather than student politicians cycling through on one-year terms. The Tkacs administration’s tenure provided perhaps the strongest evidence yet for that argument. When SOFAB ran out of money because nobody thought to save half for the spring, it was not because student senators are bad people. It was because they are amateurs managing six-figure budgets with no institutional memory and no professional oversight, and the results are exactly what you would expect.

The Scorecard

Tkacs made roughly ten distinct campaign promises. Of those, two were clearly delivered: the continuation and growth of the late-night shuttle, and the continuation of Uber discounts. Both were inherited from the Byars administration. One promise — Travel Tuesdays — was substantially altered into the Zipcar partnership, which is real but serves a different population than the one originally targeted. The remaining seven promises — advising reform, “Conversations with Courtney,” Narcan distribution, cup covers, the Angel Shot program, expanded hourly parking, and reduced counseling wait times — show no evidence of meaningful implementation. Some generated non-binding recommendations. Most simply disappeared.

The administration’s one genuinely original initiative, the Zipcar partnership, is a legitimate accomplishment that required real coordination with university administrators. It deserves recognition. But one car-rental deal, a maintained shuttle, and continued Uber discounts do not constitute the transformative “students first” agenda that was promised.

What the administration did produce, in abundance, was crisis. The impeachment proceedings consumed September. The SOFAB collapse consumed January and February. The senate’s output was dominated by non-binding recommendations and self-serving bills. And through it all, the issues that students raised most frequently — parking, housing, advising, mental health access, course registration — remained essentially unchanged.

Tkacs is not uniquely responsible for all of this. Student Government is a structurally weak institution that depends on university administrators’ goodwill to accomplish anything binding. The budget cut from $340,000 to $185,000 was not her doing. The impeachment, whatever its merits, consumed bandwidth that could have been spent on policy. And some promises — like reducing counseling wait times — require cooperation from offices that have little incentive to listen to a student president with a one-year term.

But accountability is not about whether the job was hard. It is about whether you did it. Tkacs told students she would fix advising, expand parking options, put Narcan in their hands, reduce counseling waits, and keep showing up at their organizations to listen. She did not do most of those things. The administration she led oversaw a funding board that spent its entire budget in one semester and a senate where half the members never authored a single bill. Those facts matter more than any slogan to most students.

What Comes Next

Voting for Tkacs’s successor takes place February 24 and 25, with results expected February 26. Whoever wins will inherit an organization in a familiar but particularly acute state of disrepair: a funding system that just collapsed, a senate with a documented productivity problem, and a student body that — if it pays attention to Student Government at all — has fresh reason to wonder whether the institution is capable of serving anyone other than itself.

The next president would do well to study this term not as a cautionary tale about one person, but as a case study in what happens when campaign ambition meets institutional inertia and nobody builds the bridge between them. Nearly every promise Tkacs made was reasonable in isolation. Free buses to grocery stores, Narcan in nightlife areas, shorter counseling waits — these are not radical ideas. They are the kinds of practical, achievable improvements that students actually want.

The problem was never the ideas. The problem was execution, follow-through, and the fundamental mismatch between what Student Government says it will do every March and what it is structurally capable of delivering by the following February. Until that mismatch is addressed — whether through professional staffing of key functions, multi-year strategic plans that survive leadership transitions, or a basic expectation that campaign promises be tracked publicly — the next administration will end up right where this one did — with a list of things it said and a much shorter list of things it did.

Courtney Tkacs promised to keep students first. With a month left in her term, the most honest assessment is that students are still last.