The room fell silent as the votes were tallied. After an hour and a half of heated debate, accusations and explanations, Student Services Financial Committee chair Roman Patzner broke the 6-6 vote on the eligibility of Diversity Education Specialists to receive funding. Patzner voted no, thus securing DES’s ineligibility.

DES consists of a professional staff whose goal is to build coalitions between student groups in order to promote a more welcoming campus climate for students of color and to educate the university community about diversity issues.

“Our staff would become the campus’s most effective bridge-building body to connect groups that want to work together to make the campus climate one that everybody can honor,” explained Michael Franklin, DES staff member and University of Wisconsin student.

SSFC members, in challenging DES’s eligibility, cited duplication of services as a reason to deny funding.

“I don’t see that DES is invaluable to diversity issues on campus,” said SSFC committee member Mark Baumgardner. “The administration is already spending a great deal of money on these issues, and it’s wrong to charge students twice for the same services.”

To support his claim that the administration’s efforts to promote success for students of color are effective, Baumgardner mentioned a statistic stating that in the past ten years the number of students of color graduating with a bachelor’s degree has increased by 86 percent.

“A statistic like that doesn’t happen by itself,” Baumgardner said.
SSFC member Rob Welygan said he felt the discussion centered too much on the monetary aspect of the committee’s job and placed too little emphasis on providing students with service.

“The question is not how much money we spend but what services we provide,” Welygan said. “Money is only the means by which we make sure these services happen.”

Fellow SSFC member Andrew Bryan agreed funding decisions should reflect student needs.

“The funding already being spent on diversity issues is clearly not enough,” Bryan said. “Our campus needs to support all efforts to promote diversity, and it will be a sad day when a group devoted to that effort is denied eligibility.”

Monica San Miguel, another committee member, said DES provides a unique and important service to university students.

“Who else is hiring a professional staff to work on all these issues?” she said.
Franklin agreed DES symbolizes a student effort unique to the campus and the nation.

“DES is the effort of students to build a coalition to improve the quality of the campus climate,” Franklin said. “There is nothing else like this.”

SSFC member Ryan Nichols expressed concern over DES’s accessibility to the student body at large. He said DES concentrates its efforts on groups associated with students of color and neglects to extend its services to the rest of the campus population.

“Simply offering a service is not the same as serving,” Nichols said. “Just because you offer the service doesn’t mean you are actively serving a community.”
Nichols pointed out DES did not spend its advertising budget last year, overlooking one way to reach students who are not associated with any student of color groups.

Another barrier to DES’s eligibility identified by SSFC was violation of Associated Students of Madison’s by-laws. Nichols said one violation was “failing to serve the entire student population;” the other was submitting a funding request after the due date.

“These violations alone are grounds on which to find DES ineligible,” Nichols said.
After the ruling in which the committee found DES ineligible, Franklin said SSFC failed to ask what impact removing the services would have on students.
Franklin also questioned the discussion leading to the committee’s decision — a discussion he felt was full of misinformation and poor leadership.

“I am extremely disappointed that the chair of the committee, who has full knowledge of DES’s services, failed to dispel the basic myths and misinformation that members used to make their undereducated decision,” Franklin said. “This decision will threaten the future of student coalition building to improve campus climate through diversity education.”