“This could be worth endless and endless hours of discussion,” Dean of Students Luoluo Hong warned as she opened her radio talk show late Monday afternoon.
Endless as the issues may seem, Hong’s show is only an hour long. But the dean’s radio program provided a medium Monday for cataloging a busy and bristling week in student-government affairs.
Hong invited four members of the Associated Students of Madison and its various committees to discuss the Segregated Student Finance Committee’s recent rejection of four organization budgets. Naturally, the guests also discussed Chancellor John Wiley’s controversial ruling overturning another ASM decision regarding the student group MEChA.
But Hong’s listeners, like many students on campus not tapped intravenously to campus politics, are not always familiar with the student-council buzzwords. For instance, what exactly is SSFC?
“It covers student organization budgets — things that aren’t allocable,” Rep. Angela Frozena explained.
Frozena told Hong SSFC practices and performance were brought into specific relief during the well-publicized Supreme Court case filed by Scott Southworth.
“The case was about the concern of students having to fund organizations they disagree with,” Frozena said. She told Hong that as the case proceeded through the courts, the subject of viewpoint-neutrality became a central concern.
“The courts found that viewpoint-neutrality was not an issue. Obviously, not everyone agrees with that,” Frozena said.
Student government is full of factions and dissent, which last week’s attempted impeachment drove home, and SSFC representative Josh Orton said he agreed with Frozena only to a point.
“There’s a great burden on people who make these decisions,” Orton said. “You can criticize a group for not spending money effectively, but you have to ask yourself if you’re attacking the content or the operations of the group itself.”
When Hong asked what other standards the SSFC and ASM had, Orton stressed the importance of objective political arguments.
“With a strenuous approach to enforcing that standard, biases can be fished out,” Orton said.
One suggestion for eliminating conflicts in the allocation was a segregated-fee opt-out system, which ASM rejected last week and Hong’s guests tackled readily. With this system in place, students would be able to pick and choose which groups they wanted to fund with their fees money.
“[The system] will give a more apathetic person more protection,” Frozena said.
“That’s exactly what we don’t want,” Orton said. “The last thing we want to do is protect apathy.”
SSFC Rep. Faith Kurtyka said an opt-out system would never work and that if implemented “would be a bureaucratic nightmare.”
ASM representative Matt Modell stood behind the measure. Modell noted some groups’ use of seg-fee dollars towards dinners, T-shirts and luxury expenses because they had money left over from their budgets.
“I haven’t seen anything, any events, from some of these groups since October,” Modell said. “Let’s let students decide.”
The student council insiders made time at the end of the program to discuss Wiley’s decision to grant MEChA funding. Wiley has been heavily scrutinized for the decision, and student council resolved last week to let the chancellor discern MEChA’s budget particulars. Monday, in letters to both student newspapers, Wiley said such a resolution ignored due process.
“The chancellor decided not to meet with any students,” Modell said. “I’m not sure how the chancellor’s protecting students’ interests right now.”
Orton praised Wiley and called the original argument against MEChA “balsa-wood thin,” to which Kurtyka agreed.
“By cutting these groups’ funding, you’re saving each student a dollar. That’s not very much money,” Kurtyka said. “Think of all the learning experiences and volunteer opportunities you’re sacrificing for that dollar.”
Orton ended the show by saying controversy is beneficial to campus climate and that he was “happy with the free-speech forum.”
