In a heated meeting last night, members of University of Wisconsin student government once again did not vote on a funding eligibility decision for a student organization.
Among accusations of viewpoint neutrality violations during the meeting and debate over the processes being used, members of Associated Students of Madison Student Council did not vote on the Multicultural Student Coalition’s eligibility as had been originally planned after a hearing last week.
This came after Student Services Finance Committee voted to support Chair Sarah Neibart’s move to freeze MCSC’s funds Monday after learning of four alleged intentional policy violations made by the group.
In last night’s meeting, MCSC member Swati Bhargava read a message from MCSC member Althea Miller, which said the occurences were a misunderstanding and that MCSC would never go out of its way to violate a policy.
Tensions rose during the meeting when the body decided not to allow members of SSFC to have speaking rights. Student Council Chair Allie Gardner said she would not be allowing it because the decision was in the hands of Student Council and not SSFC, and a motion to overrule her failed.
SSFC Secretary Ellie Bruecker spoke in open forum and said she was disappointed in the body for silencing a group of student voices.
“I agree that this is Student Council’s decision,” she said. “But we aren’t here to give opinions but rather to be here as unbiased resources.”
Student Council again came to a point of contention when Gardner said the body would vote on who would be allowed to vote in the eligibility decision.
Ultimately, the body voted to exclude anyone from voting who had not been present at the eligibility hearing last week.
In an interview with The Badger Herald, Rep. Cale Plamann said this constituted a viewpoint neutrality violation, because UW Legal had made it clear that Student Council would have to follow the same process SSFC does in eligibility decisions.
He said SSFC’s consistent procedure this year has been to allow members to vote on eligibility either if they were at the budget hearing or if they lobbied with the group and listened to meeting minutes. He said the vote showed members were voting with a clear intention to exclude other representatives from voting despite adhering to the process SSFC had been uniformly using.
“You have to have a uniform process,” he said. “What was done here was done clearly for political reasons … people were well aware of the members who would be excluded by their vote and made that vote for a political reason.”
In an interview with the Herald, Neibart said she found this to be a blatant viewpoint neutrality violation as well.
She also said for members to silence the voices of some students and to disregard the information regarding MCSC’s intentional policy violations was inappropriate and immature.
“Even though we didn’t want this in this body, my stance on this was if this was going to happen in this body it had to be done right,” she said. “I think that tonight was a pivotal moment to show the disappointment, and also kind of the failures of 18th session Student Council.”
In the final minutes of the meeting, Student Council got to debating MCSC’s eligibility, and after two members spoke the body adjourned. Its next meeting will take place tonight, where the eligibility decision process will continue.
