The Government of the Student Body senate is known for debating heavily over controversial items, but now it looks as if controversy may have spilled onto the GSB senate itself.

Since the beginning of the semester, about 10 seats have been vacated by senators who have resigned, with three of the resignations occurring over the past week.

Some resignations were said to be a result of dissatisfaction with the GSB senate, leaving students and the remaining senators thoroughly baffled.

Marty Forth, former international senator, said he was unhappy with the attitudes prevalent in the senate and was dissatisfied by the way the senate was run.

“I didn’t feel that I could get what I wanted accomplished, and I don’t feel that the majority of GSB is there for the right reasons,” he said.

Forth also said he did not feel GSB was working efficiently toward its goal of helping students at Iowa State.

“Before I resigned, I went through all the bills, and I found that approximately 90 percent of the bills have nothing to do with the students,” he said. “The [senate] is not there for the students; it’s there for personal empowerment.

“The idea of GSB is to help the students, and I don’t want to be associated with a group that doesn’t want to do that,” he said.

Forth said the meetings were run inefficiently and were often dragged out by a lot of pointless bickering among senators.

“The meetings are not run well. [GSB Vice President Jamal] White needs to rule with an iron fist and not give people so much liberty,” Forth said.

“Many senators have resigned, and some others haven’t even resigned — they’ve just stopped coming to meetings — all ultimately for the same reason,” he said.

Elizabeth Keller, former engineering senator who also recently resigned, said the time commitment caused a problem for her.

“The time commitment was the biggest reason I had to resign,” Keller said. “We were there for three or four hours every meeting, and that was not what I wanted to get myself into.

“The bickering on the bills was too much, and it slowed things down way too much,” she said. “Since there was no time limit on the bills, it caused the meetings to be too long and the time commitment to be way too much.”

Keller said the attitudes of other senators did not really affect her decision to resign, but she was aware of others who were affected by such attitudes.

“I wasn’t really affected — you just had to deal with it, I guess. I do know that there was a problem for other people, and there were people who did resign because of other senators,” she said.

Keller also said GSB was not at all what she expected.

“A lot of us who got into it didn’t know what we were getting into. I’ve been in other organizations, and I thought GSB would be as efficient, but it wasn’t,” she said. “I personally don’t know if it’s been like this before, but another senator, Casey Powers, who also resigned, said it has never been like this.”

Mike Pogge, LAS, said he was disappointed by the recent resignations.

“I am saddened that so may senators are resigning, but there are so many reasons. Some have said they have a problem with the time commitment, and some have said that they have a problem with the attitudes of other senators,” he said.

“We had senators resign over the summer, and people on the senate this year are finding way more activities to partake in than there were last year,” Pogge said. “They are participating in more activities and don’t have the time. Time has been cited in nearly all the resignation letters — and that makes a difference.”

Pogge said if so many senators did not like others’ attitudes and the senate’s inefficiency, they could have tried to change things without resigning.

“If so many senators resigned because of dissatisfaction with the senate, they had enough numbers to do something about it,” he said. “But instead they chose to resign.”

Bryan Burkhardt, president of GSB, said he thought maybe the time commitment for the senate was more than some people expected.

“My take on the situation is that I think that some senators did not find GSB to be what they expected it to be, and they weren’t expecting GSB to be such a large time commitment,” he said.

Burkhardt said he was surprised by the number of resignations.

“I am shocked that we’ve had so many senators resign. However, I want to make sure that the senators we do have are committed to their position,” he said. “I also assert that the way for GSB to be more effective is for the students to hold their senators and executives accountable.”