“Instead of chastising the committee for not giving it a fourth chance to clear up confusion, it should simply jettison Mr. Lasowsky and prepare for next year’s eligibility hearings.”

The point isn’t a year of no funding, it’s that during this year of no funding, CWC will lose their office space, six VERY decent computers, and an office full of furniture. Even if eligibility goes smoothly next year, all of the above will be scavenged by GSSF and CWC has zero claim to any of it when they come back.

Best-case scenario, this would take two fiscal years to repair: Apply in 2010, get funding July 1st 2011, haul ass with SWAP, Dell, and DoIT purchases to recover by September 2012 MAYBE. Crippled until Fall semester 2012, because of one guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing? How is that reasonable? (This model assumes that SSFC won’t grant a one-time spike in computer funding to jump-start the CWC’s office.)

The problem is that if you buy the whole “we should get a second chance because we were incompetent” excuse, viewpoint neutrality mandates that you have to buy that excuse from every group. That means that for the rest of the year whenever any group gets denied anything, you have to sit through their 3 appeals as they recalculate and rephrase everything.

The points about being on campus for a long time that 8:19 brought up violate viewpoint neutrality. By federal law, exceptions cannot be made on the basis of how long a group has been on campus or how long they have received funding or the value of the services they provide.

If one of the concerns is a matter of retaining capital purchases for the CWC, last year I proposed looking into creating a massive RSO inventory system which would lead to the potential of Finance Committee being able to purchase capital items such as computers and printers for organizations and letting them retain those purchases (as well as former GSSF groups who no longer receive funding being able to retain those purchases) as long as they remain an RSO.

Currently, Finance Chair Matt Beemsterboer and an ASM intern are working on setting up this sort of inventory system. If this system can be implemented before the next fiscal year (and I believe that it is very possible for this to be the case), CWC will be able to retain its capital items.

As for Memorial Union Space, perhaps a one-year lease deal could be worked out between ASM, CWC, the Office of the Dean of Students and the Union to house CWC temporarily (or permanently) through an alternative funding source or other agreement.

This would effectively allow the Campus Women’s Center to continue providing programming on campus despite not meeting the eligibility requirements for GSSF funding. Also, CWC could then consider reworking its structure and its programming to match the requirements for funding. Again, I believe this is a feat that could be done without substantially altering the basic framework of CWC.

If anyone would like to know more about these ideas please feel free to contact me. kgosselin@wisc.edu

Kurt M. Gosselin

The memorial union is getting ready to build a ramp through the CWC’s office within 1-3 years to make the Great Hall more compliant with ADA requirements. So negotiating with the MU for space is difficult no matter how you cut it, them losing funding just makes it worse.

I would like to respond to a few points made in this editorial article: First, the statement “Mr. Lasowsky’s original application, however, did not reveal any sort of expertise” is not very specific. If you said that I did not answer question #7 in the best way possible, I would agree with you. I made my estimate based off of my general knowledge of CWC’s programming and did not spend as much time as I should have to find out exactly how many hours each CWC coordinator spends on Direct Services (however, there is no standard or example provided by SSFC of how this question should be answered). I also shouldn’t have included Kid’s Time and Kid’s Night Out in the CWC’s Direct Services in the original Eligibility application. That said, the rest of the application was not heavily questioned by the SSFC and thus was sufficient for the Eligibility process. Second,the statement “But this hinged on the capability of a student of the system who never got more than a C in SSFC 101” is bordering on libel. There is no SSFC 101. SSFC members do not receive grades. Even interpreted as “Zorian is not a good finance coordinator for the CWC” this statement is not supported by the rest of the article. Being the primary contact person for eligibility is only a small portion of my overall job responsibilities. By saying that I should be “jettisoned” because of eligibility issues disregards the other responsibilities that I fulfill on a day to day basis and paints me in an unnecessarily negative light. When you make an extreme statement like that you should take the time to evaluate all that it means. Lastly, “Mr. Lasowsky admits that SSFC was well within its right to deny CWC based on what it submitted” is only a portion of what I actually said. The full statement should read “Mr. Lasowsky admits that SSFC was well within its right to deny CWC eligibility based on the SSFC’s understanding of the submitted materials relating to CWC’s direct services, but that understanding was incorrect and the decision was unfair as a result”.

I would like to ask that people with founded criticism meet with me in person during my office hours or contact me via email.

Thank you

this is the kind of stuff that makes the student papers any worthwhile, college drama. way to egg it on badger herald, but someone needs to gate keep your ridiculous opinion board… if this isn’t already libelous, it’s dangerously close….

… you think that the graduate journalism program would eradicate this kind of crap out of its students, but i guess you can’t win them all…