If you are a student not currently participating in any campus, student or other organizations, I want you to ask yourself why. If you don’t, it probably means you don’t know or value the benefits of participating in such organizations.

Participating in an organization can provide you with some of your most important life experiences. You learn more about your limitations, your strengths and your communication style, as well as where you fit within dynamic, organized, functional groups and what role you can play best within that group. You also learn about your ability to commit to a goal and see it through to completion.

These are the some of the most important and practical lessons you can learn during some of your free time. You can do this, while working on something you personally value, with no cost other than maybe foregoing the latest mental-Novocain of whatever TV program or other non-constructive activity that will likely dictate where you should fit into this society.

Granted, you pay a student fee, about $53 including the increase in next year’s financial resources, for student-service organizations, but the opportunity to develop yourself as a person during your college years is priceless compared to what it will cost you to do so when you graduate from college. The opportunities to network and develop organizational and business skills are invaluable.

Now, at this point I could care less what you think about student activities and the segregated-fee system. From personal experience, I know for a fact that using the fee system through student organizing is valuable. Just realize two things: Purposefully attempting to discredit, de-legitimize and negatively portray a student organization in any public forum is extremely insulting and disrespectful to those in engaged in organizational activities and technically, is in violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Nonetheless, those same students are gaining valuable experience despite what is said about them, which is the bright side. It is up to you whether or not you want to gain valuable experience, too. If you feel like you don’t need the experience or value the same goals as those who organize, be grateful for having that luxury.

We have a student-fee system and that likely won’t change. However, those actively utilizing the student-fee system also have a responsibility.

ASM should set the example. ASM must work to view itself as a service-providing, administrative unit that operates more formally. Culture develops within any institutionalized organization, but ASM must be careful not to let past practices of informality and insular social congeniality dictate how the organization functions.

Organizations that receive student fees, especially those funded out of the General Student Services Fund, should mirror this effort to evaluate and evolve how their respective services are delivered and to be increasingly accountable for their budgets.

All students pay a lot of money, in good faith and not-so-good faith, to provide the means for these organizations to exist. All student organizations owe it to every student to make their service as professional, accessible and visible to the campus as possible.

As a university that struggles with providing both racial and cultural diversity, as well as ideological diversity, the UW administration, especially Chancellor Wiley, must not look a gift horse in mouth when assessing the student-organization program on campus. It should offer the system and ASM as much support as possible.

The student-organization program provides possibly the brightest hope for realizing the goals of Plan 2008, making this campus one that is no longer known for its isolating intolerance (if you are white, think twice before responding to this statement) and lack of accommodation of non-white, differently-abled and non-majority-lifestyle students. Without such cooperation between students and the administration, Plan 2008 is doomed to fail.

Hopefully, the passing of the budgets for the Multicultural Student Center and Diversity Education Specialists, along with the work of groups like Generation 2008, ASM, Promoting Racial and Ethnic Awareness and the Student Fee Defenders will continue to be examples of how this can happen in the future. All these groups want to do is facilitate the interaction of large groups of people, including other student organizations, for the betterment of all on campus.

The coming year will tell a lot about the direction this campus will go in the future. Hopefully knowledge, respect and compassion will prevail.

Lamont Smith ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in economics and political science. He is the former chair of the ASM Student Services Finance Committee.