Tonight, the Associated Students of Madison starts off the new semester with renewed plans and goals for campaigns that address some of the campus’ prominent issues. These issues include promoting a diverse campus population, keeping alcoholic entertainment affordable, encouraging the power of student voices in state government and aiding students’ education through advising.

ASM’s Plan 2008 campaign works as student government’s response to the University of Wisconsin administration’s commitment to diversity.

“The administration made the commitment because students wanted it, but they don’t always follow through,” said Plan 2008 chair Marion Ecks. “This campaign holds the administration accountable for their efforts.”

One of the campaign’s goals this semester is to implement research techniques to help determine why students of color leave the university more frequently than white students. For example, Ecks said, the campaign might study student-satisfaction surveys to figure out how withdrawal students rate the campus. From there, the university could attempt to find ways to address the issues of dissatisfied groups of the student population.

“We want to directly ask why some students are unhappy with the campus climate,” Ecks said.

Ecks said she hopes such information will lead to better use of funding money to support diversity groups.

“The efforts of this campaign affect all of us,” Ecks said. “Out in the real world, our graduates are accused of inability to work with people from other cultures. There’s a reason for that.”

Another of ASM’s major campaigns this year is the Alcohol Issues Campaign, which chair Drew Horn said strives to maintain the affordability of one of students’ favorite pastimes.

Since the voluntary one-year ban of weekend drink specials is now in place, Horn said the next step for the campaign is gathering information and statistics about drink specials and binge-drinking.

“I’ve always maintained that the bars are not the real problem,” Horn said. “Now our job is to prove it.”

The campaign will also lobby City Council in an attempt to force the council to give bars permission to offer alternatives to drinking. Horn said rules now prevent most bars from having other forms of entertainment.

Horn said he also wants to raise student awareness about the dangers of binge-drinking.

The main objective, however, is gathering data to save drink specials.

“I want the campaign to present a compelling case to Chancellor Wiley in a year’s time showing that drink specials are not the cause of binge-drinking,” Horn said.

The Vote 2002 campaign will continue to work with the Vote 2002 Coalition to encourage student voting. One concrete goal, according to chair Anita Bertram, is to increase voter turnout by 20 percent. ASM’s campaign will work with the coalition to set up a congressional debate between Tammy Baldwin and Ron Greer, as well as register student voters.

“Student power is based on student voting,” Bertram said. “We can’t lobby to (the) Legislature to stop raising our tuition or other important issues if we aren’t even their constituents.”

ASM advising campaign chair Lisa Streit said the campaign will strive to expand the amount of peer advising available to students and give students more information about advising resources available to them.

“We want to push for more peer advising and let departments that don’t offer it know that this service is something students appreciate,” Streit said.
The campaign will also try to implement an advising reference sheet for freshmen on the My UW webpages.