Mississippi State University students will be asked to vote on two referendums — the possibility of bringing back the yearbook and the potential adjustment of the university’s tobacco policy — during the Homecoming election Tuesday.
The Reveillereferendum will ask if students would be interested in purchasing a yearbook at a cost of $35. Rhett Hobart, Student Association president, wrote the referendum to gauge the student body’s reaction to the return of a yearbook.
There have been preliminary talks with publishers to gather basic publishing cost information, Hobart said.
“We want to bring it back to serve the student body as a whole,” he said. “We don’t want to bring it back until we see the vote of the student body.”
If the student body has a positive reaction to the return the Reveille, this is the first of a number of steps that would go into its resurrection, Hobart said.
“We want to bring it back as soon as possible, but we’re not sure as to when it will be,” he said.
The tobacco-free campus referendum was passed by the SA senate and is an attempt to gain student feedback on what kind of policy the student body wants on tobacco, Hobart said.
“The tobacco-free campus (initiative) is being discussed by multiple levels of campus,” he said. “It’s something that the SA is going to make a decision on, and we need to know what the students want.”
The referendum will ask students if they want a tobacco-free campus, a campus with designated tobacco areas or if they want to keep the current tobacco policy intact, he said.
Hobart said the information gathered from the referendums will give SA the information on how to move forward in both issues and likened the vote to a straw poll.
“The passage (of these referendums) isn’t a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ It’s just to see the interest of the student body,” he said.
To vote in the Homecoming election and on the referendums, students can go online and sign into their student accounts on myState.