The walls of Jameson Broggi’s Horseshoe apartment are covered with moments from early American history.
The Constitution, Bill of Rights and George Washington’s first inaugural address each hangs, framed and yellowed, on one wall beside a painting of the battle of Lexington, Mass. A portrait of Washington is pinned to his lapel.
Throughout the room, there are copies of the Mayflower Compact, the text of Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty” speech and a letter Washington wrote to a Jewish congregation in Rhode Island, ensuring their religious freedom. There are more, of course.
Broggi, a third-year political science student, thinks USC should make its graduates take classes about the U.S.’s founding documents. After a friend found a little-known, unenforced state law requiring public universities to do so, they set off on a months-long effort to get USC to comply with it.
Now, that effort’s led Broggi to run for student body president. If he’s elected, he says, he’d be able to keep pressure on the university and interact more with USC’s administrators and trustees.
He hopes his push will improve the country, if only in a small way.
“This is something I can do to help make a difference,” Broggi said. “Like it or not, every single one of us is going to rule this country through our voting.”
So far, Broggi’s results have been mixed. He’s gotten a few state legislators to write letters to USC President Harris Pastides asking him to follow the law, and he’s consulted with a few trustees and one former governor. But he’s also found resistance from university officials.
Pastides wrote a letter to a state senator earlier this month, saying USC wouldn’t follow the law unless it was updated. It would cause an “academic logjam,” he wrote.
Broggi said he expects compliance could take several years and that he thinks current students should be grandfathered into USC’s current requirements. In the mean time, he’s still setting up meetings with legislators to ask for support.
“I don’t want to change or add any more hours, but I’m talking about shifting priorities,” he said.
Broggi isn’t too shy about how his campaign could be perceived. Some might find it funny, he offers, but he doesn’t think he’s a single-issue candidate.
He wants to push Carolina Dining to let students use two meal swipes in one meal period, he wants USC to scan students’ CarolinaCards when they leave football games before halftime to keep them from getting loyalty points and he wants more of a middle ground in parking prices.
And, he says, he thinks he’ll be able to handle whatever other issues might come up in a year in office.
“We’re all going to try to improve the university,” he said.
But his passion lies in the country’s founding — in asking students to learn more about the documents that frame the structure of government in America; To learn more about Washington, his favorite Founding Father, and the sacrifices he made; and to learn more about the principles that first guided the country, at a time when constitutional questions crop up year after year.
“We say, ‘I have this right,’ or, ‘I have that right,’ but what are they?” Broggi said. “I don’t think you can know that unless you read the Declaration or read the Constitution.”