Given the recent squabbling over its very right to exist, the fact that ASM has been unable to fill a handful of positions on the all-powerful Student Services Finance Committee may seem like an almost negligible pin drop amidst an earthquake of bureaucratic failure.
However, as always with the wild-eyed, blundering pinnacle of incompetence that is our student government, there is more to every failure than meets the eye. SSFC, of all the various committees on ASM – both the necessary and irrelevant – has been a veritable breeding ground for budding student leaders. Alex Gallagher, leader of an internal reform movement, was a former chair of SSFC, while Gerald Cox, a Herald columnist and former communications chair for the College Dems, served as a committee member.
As Fearless Sifting notes in an earlier post, there is a myriad of positions that have remained unfilled, forcing the College Autocrats in the Memorial Union to accept applications on a rolling basis.
But what is so disastrous about a failure to fill SSFC in particular is that the relative panache associated with the position – control over a budget worth millions – is no longer enough to keep SSFC fully staffed. To be sure, failure to fill positions on ASM’s Constitutional Committee or its Press Office are troubling signals, but with six positions of various import unfilled on SSFC, ASM will either have to consider diminishing the size of its most important committee from its current size of 18 in order to compensate for the shortfall or continue into the fall semester horrifically understaffed.
This, more so even than Alex Gallagher’s resignation, may be the shot not heard round UW that signals the end of ASM as an effective organization. As Gerald Cox pointed out earlier in the year, perhaps the calls for disbandment, many of which admittedly came from this author, were premature. Perhaps ASM will die as a result of apathy as opposed to activism.
Or perhaps ASM, in the words of another make-believe autocrat, may never truly die. Instead, this bloated example of all that is wrong with student government might just fade away into the annals of irrelevance.
Posted by Sam Clegg
