The Associated Students of Madison’s Student Services Finance Committee decided last week to revoke the Multicultural Student Coalition’s eligibility for segregated fee-based funding. This is the last move in what has become a trend of targeting student organizations who work to promote a more diverse and inclusive campus climate, including the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztl?n, Wunk Sheek, Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group, Asian Pacific American Council and the Campus Women’s Center. It is sad and ironic that in an establishment that praises itself for promoting the Wisconsin Idea and has embraced an official diversity policy of “Inclusive Excellence,”  the students’ elected government does not steer as the avant garde of such efforts, but rather attempts to hinder and reverse them.

Consider one example. As with MCSC, SSFC had sought to deny CWC funding on the basis of insufficient “direct services.” As a result, the CWC staff spent more than 100 hours working on providing SSFC with documents for the lengthy hearing process. Surely these hours must have come on the expense of us, who use the center’s services, “direct” and “indirect” alike. If this experience is any indication at all, SSFC might try to take MCSC through a lengthy process that exhausts all possible procedures, as well as the organization’s valuable resources.

I can think of only few reasons to justify such an attitude. One option may be that SSFC secretly promotes a hidden agenda of transforming all student activists into lawyers and accountants by forcing them to gain the precious expertise of dealing with countless hearings and appeals. Alternatively, it could be the case that SSFC tries to prevent student organizations from fulfilling their mission statement by diverting their energy to tedious paperwork. But to be less cynical and more realistic, it is also possible SSFC simply does what every organization does best – preserving the grounds for its own operations in order to justify its existence. If this is the case, SSFC is more than successful, for it gradually establishes its superiority and tyrant rule over student life.

There is a crucial difference between leadership and technocracy. The SSFC majority have proven that they are terribly good bureaucrats, but not much more than that. They lack the visionary and out-of-the-box way of thinking that characterizes the best of our student organizations, such as MCSC. While they praise themselves as the guardians of our collective monies, they fail to guarantee our shared interests. And if an ASM body can’t do that, what is it good for?

Naama Nagar ([email protected]) is a graduate student in sociology.