During my time as a columnist for the Daily, the Michigan Student Assembly has been a frequent target of mine. Two years ago, I wrote about the crisis of leadership in the assembly during the troubled, scandal-ridden tenure of Zack Yost. Last winter, when assembly meetings were hijacked by people who wanted to discuss unsolvable foreign policy issues, I argued that MSA had made itself irrelevant by failing to address campus issues. I have ranged from advocating new assembly leadership to questioning the need for MSA at all.

But this week, I found myself feeling bad for MSA. And that’s because the University has swindled them.

It all started this summer when Dr. Douglas Smith, a University professor, first contacted MSA about a variety of issues — among them, concerns about the Department of Public Safety Oversight Committee. The committee’s purpose is to review the actions of DPS, the University’s police force, as required by state law. The law also stipulates that two students, faculty members and employees must sit on the committee, and that the campus at large must elect them.

According to e-mail exchanges between Smith and MSA members, MSA was initially eager to talk with him about the DPS Oversight Committee. But once his attempts to contact various members became more pronounced, the executive board sought the opinion of General Counsel, the University’s chief legal consultants. Here’s the key: General Counsel recommended that MSA not meet with Smith.

That policy ended Tuesday, when Smith was finally allowed to speak at an MSA meeting following a special investigation by the Daily that found the DPS Oversight Committee to be in violation of state law. The Daily reported Monday that the committee routinely lacked student members for months at a time, and that MSA was appointing the members instead of holding student-wide elections called for by state law.

The fact that the DPS Oversight Committee has been so dramatically failing its mandate should come as a disturbing wake-up call. How can students trust DPS to keep an eye on them when the body responsible for keeping an eye on DPS meets infrequently, reviews only a fraction of the grievances that are filed with DPS and doesn’t even have student representation for half the year? The law mandates that an oversight committee needs to actively examine police decisions for the good of the campus as a whole. To neglect this committee is reckless.

But the only thing more concerning than the state of the committee is that the University has done nothing to fix it for years. And this is why I’m feeling bad for MSA: It appears that the University essentially dropped its own failings onto MSA by giving them bad legal advice.

After all, the University administration had to know that the DPS Oversight Committee was in deplorable shape and breaking the law. This has been going on for too long for administrators to not know about the problems with the committee (and if they truly didn’t know, that’s an entirely different problem). And once Smith began his heckling, they had to be aware of the problem. Why, then, tell MSA to ignore him?

It’s reasonable for the MSA executives to have been unsure about whether Smith’s concerns were legitimate, but it’s completely ridiculous for General Counsel to be unsure about them. The only explanation is that the University knowingly told MSA to suppress the view that the DPS Oversight Committee was seriously flawed. Either General Counsel thought the issue would simply go away, or it figured MSA would take the blame and divert attention from the administration’s failings.

Now that MSA has heard Smith speak, its leaders will begin looking at how to fix student representation on the committee. But will the more troubling issue — the fact that the University misled, either deliberately or out of complete idiocy, the student government on a matter of state law — ever be addressed?

When the campus police force is operating without oversight, we’ve got a bad but fixable situation. When student government ignores the person who brings this up, it’s a mistake but maybe an understandable one. But when the student government ignores the issue on the recommendation of the University’s chief legal counsel, what can we even do?

As MSA discusses ways to fix student representation on the committee, it must be mindful of whom it takes its cues from.