A new committee tied to Associated Students of Madison‘s Shared Governance Committee will provide students with a voice in allocating tuition used to pay for technology on campus.
The Student Information Technology Initiative Advisory Committee will advise the University of Wisconsin administration on money that is left over from the Student Technology Fee, which is 1.7 percent of students’ tuition.
The STF is part of state legislation that stipulates where the money can go to technology on campus. This year, the STF provided UW with $8 million in technology funding.
Shared Governance Chair Melissa Hanley said money can go to libraries and to the Division of Informational Technology, but said the STF could not be used on specific technology that not all students on campus could use, such as new computers for the chemistry department.
Hanley said at the end of every year, the programs that receive the STF usually have extra funds left over. The new committee would accept applications from those programs with recommendations on how the extra money could be spent.
The structure of receiving applications and ideas is similar to that of the Madison Initiative, Hanley said.
She said the applications from the programs could use the leftover money to go beyond the specific constraints in the Legislature.
The committee will consist of nine voting members: three faculty members, three academic staff and three students, who Shared Governance will appoint within the next few weeks.
There will also be non-voting members from DoIT and other technology entities on campus such as MyUW and WiscMail who will regularly attend meetings and provide their expertise to the voting members, Hanley said.
Brian Rust, senior administrative program specialist of DoIT, said although students have had a voice in how the STF has been spent in the past, this is the first time there will be student participation in deciding where the funds go.
The first meeting has yet to be determined because the student committee members have not yet been selected. Hanley said there will be a campuswide e-mail to all students to look for committee members sent out sometime next week.