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Two SSFC candidates make their cases: UW sophomore and write in candidate Andrea Nichols and UW freshman Aliyya Terry answer the following questions: Why are you running for SSFC? What is the No. 1 problem with segregated fee allocation? What solutions do you offer? What is your definition of viewpoint neutrality? Do you have connections to any groups seeking funding? What criteria will you use to determine who gets funding?

You have until Wednesday to vote online (at asm.wisc.edu) for representatives to the Student Services Finance Committee, which allocates millions of your segregated-fee dollars. (For you freshmen, there are also elections for four open seats on the Associated Students of Madison Student Council). Did you know that? Do you care? We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Part of what makes being opinion editors for this newspaper — and members of its editorial board — so frustrating is the nagging feeling that no matter how many hours we spend editing columns, researching issues and exposing inconsistencies, most of campus just doesn’t care. We can publish a column on the “hook-up generation” and Axe products and provoke an actual conversation. But other writers can opine on something more important but less incendiary — SSFC, say, or Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk’s proposed county budget — and judging by campus response, you’d think we’d printed court transcripts from the most mundane small claims cases in recent history.

But we are committed to making sure this page doesn’t become a miniaturized version of CNN’s long-ago-cancelled “Crossfire.” We tell all our new writers to stick to state, city and campus issues. It’s an intimidating but necessary request. For as boring as some of the stuff we publish might be to those who aren’t among the several hundred odd die-hard local politicos at the University of Wisconsin, newspapers have a responsibility to publish what matters. Only secondarily are we responsible for making people care.

And yet we are writing this to do just that: to make you care. You go to one of the finest public universities in the country and you should care about what happens on your campus. This campus may be a “bubble,” but for as long as we all live in that bubble, we’ll be affected by what happens here. The ladybug perched on a leaf does not neglect the sturdiness of the leaf just because there is a broader world beyond. It cares about its world right now, as it is. It will sink or swim with that world. Campus politics might be “boring,” but this does not negate its relevance to your lives or your responsibility to understand it. You’re in it, whether you like it or not. Kapeesh?

All right. Back to SSFC. So there’s a student government election going on currently, and depending on what time you’re reading this today, you have precious little time to vote in it. As you probably know, your student government is notorious for being incompetent, unorganized and apathetic (and, most recently, delinquent in meeting attendance).

And SSFC itself is notorious for its ideological instability. This year’s committee has been decidedly viewpoint-neutral, evidenced in their brave and disinterested decisions to fund neither the Campus Women’s Center nor Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, two groups with radically different purposes and positions that nonetheless failed to qualify for funding. But other years have seen SSFC members blatantly ignore viewpoint neutrality; most notoriously, Sree Atluru spent months on SSFC in 2006 maintaining that funding the UW-Roman Catholic Foundation would violate the “separation of church and state,” despite standing Supreme Court precedent affirming it would not.

In 2000, by historical accident, the University of Wisconsin and its segregated-fee system became the center of a nationwide debate over the funding of student groups on college campuses. This culminated in the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin v. Southworth Supreme Court decision, which indeed upheld the constitutionality of a viewpoint-neutral system of student segregated-fee allocation.

This is important back-story. We wonder if the handful of candidates for SSFC — many of them freshmen — know about Southworth and recognize the magnitude of what they’re running for. We wonder if they recognize the distinct possibility that, given the right circumstances, their decisions could end up on the front page of The New York Times. As we voted for SSFC Monday morning, we browsed through the various candidate “statements,” most of which (unsurprisingly) read like campaigns for high school senior class president. But we voted just the same, after a little research, because we can’t control the fact campus governments will always put enormous responsibility on people who do not fully realize the magnitude of their positions. We can only vote for the people likeliest to accept that responsibility once they find out about it.

So if you haven’t voted yet for your new SSFC representatives, think of the election as if you were voting for Supreme Court justices. You might want someone who will interpret the Constitution correctly, who will respect court precedent, who won’t bring their personal agenda into their decision-making process. Or perhaps you don’t think this disinterestedness is appropriate for SSFC members. Maybe you want an activist SSFC, damn it. You have a responsibility to vote just the same. Just care. And if you don’t, we will continue to care in spite of you.

Note: The original version of this article stated there are two open freshmen seats on the Student Council. There are four, not two, open seats for which freshmen can vote. The Badger Herald regrets the error.