I have always had a love/hate relationship with the United Council for UW Students.

If you’re a returning student, you might be unaware that you’ve been paying $3 every semester to fund United Council staffers’ salaries, subsidizing their conventions around the state and buying enough poster board to paper the entire Capitol dome.

I’ve voiced my general annoyance with the group’s antics and typo-ridden all-UW System campus emails any number of times. Just the same, we as UW System students will be poorer without the organization.

The most common criticism I hear is that United Council failed to represent students on a wide political spectrum and generally advocated for left-leaning causes. This is not to say student causes are necessarily liberal causes, but they do seem to align a decent amount of the time. However, doing things like opining on the Trayvon Martin court decision on Facebook has done little to support the group’s assertion that they represent all students, regardless of party alignment.

These kinds of missteps allowed the general student populous to become disengaged with United Council, and I would wager the majority aren’t aware of the organization until they start handing out campaign materials every two years urging students to “vote yes” in the referendum for the campus to remain a member of the group.

No organization is perfect. But I also acknowledge United Council’s successes over the years: their volunteers registered thousands of student voters across the state in time for the presidential election, rallied support against budget cuts to the system and were instrumental in adding another student representative to the UW System Board of Regents. Members would also likely claim partial responsibility for their efforts to secure a tuition freeze across the system (which is a complicated issue and one for another column).

But while campus conservatives will cheer United Council’s demise, I mourn losing the power of a statewide advocacy group that lobbies on the behalf of all students. The ability to mobilize students behind a cause, regardless of whether their student ID was issued by a 4-year or 2-year UW institution, is a force of good. We don’t engage enough with our fellow UW System students, and while United Council had its shortcomings, they provided the only meaningful venues for these interactions between students to happen. They also never kept quiet when students were under attack and never stopped demanding a seat at the table.

It’s no accident the Joint Finance Committee slipped a provision to make the $3 refundable fee optional instead of mandatory (effectively gutting United Council’s funding source) during the summer months, when students are working or away from their campus. It was a purposeful, targeted move to undermine the statewide student group that represents 20 of 26 UW campuses at a time of year when it would be more difficult to mobilize students to oppose the measure and when most students just plain wouldn’t notice.

I hope this isn’t a harbinger of things to come. I also sincerely hope another statewide student organization grounded in passionate organizing, inclusivity and political neutrality rises up to take its place. Because when the student voice is drowned out of the public dialogue, we all stand to lose.

Katherine Krueger ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism and political science.