A student group decides to have a meeting. Rather than calling up Memorial Union to reserve a free conference room or just gathering around the nearest available table, they decide to hold their “meeting” at the Lake Lawn Resort Hotelm, an hour away in Delavan. Cost to students: $3100.
Another group decides they could foster a much better campus environment if you would buy them a ski trip to Cascade Mountain. Another buys a $1000 digital camera. Another buys $3500 in t-shirts. Another wants you to send them on spring break. Trips, banquets, balls, laptops, palm pilots, porn videos, premium office space and hundreds of thousands of dollars in student salaries and stipends, the list varies from outrageous to bizarre. Welcome to the ASM segregated fee budget.
Seg-fees are an extra $286 billon tacked onto your tuition each semester. Before ASM was established in 1994, it was $134. That’s a 113 percent increase in 10 years. Allocable seg-fees, the part that ASM has the most control over, have skyrocketed an astonishing 343 percent in 10 years. What’s amazing is that the same officials who take to the streets when another tuition hike is announced are the ones jacking your seg-fee bill through the roof. Such are the joys of spending other peoples’ money. How did this happen?
The original idea behind the seg-fee system was that student organizations would come before the student government and say, “We’d like to offer students this service.” After all, initiatives had been approved, and the total cost would be divided amongst all students as seg-fee bills. Good examples are the bus pass, the Union, and GUTS. It was a nice idea that was probably doomed from the start.
The word “service” has been stretched by a kind of good-old-boy network that has grown up in the seg-fee system. Many realized they could get more money by simply getting themselves and their friends elected to council and SSFC, and so a system of merit and honest debate was replaced by cronyism and political backbiting. Student Council has become a 33-ring circus that lasts upwards of eight hours and too often dissolves into a contest of screaming obscenities. The circus has attracted the attention of our administration. The chancellor has now intervened twice, and the bedlam shows no sign of abating.
I’ve been on student council for a year now and I marvel at how our student government has become such an accurate microcosm of all the nonsense in Washington we know and loathe. Watching it evolve on a small scale has been illuminating, and would be downright entertaining, if real people weren’t getting screwed over by this mess. However, one thing is clear: the root of this evil is definitely money, your money.
But there is a fix in the works. Many of us are trying to short-circuit the political machine and leave more of the decisions to you. The idea is simple: instead of getting a bill for a fixed amount, you would get a list of services with their own price tags and information on those services when you register for classes. You could then decide which are providing a service and opt out of those that only serve to line somebody’s pockets. There would be a baseline of services that wouldn’t be optional; namely the bus pass, union, UHS, and rec sports. Such systems are already working in Minnesota and Virginia. The Supreme Court took the unusual trouble to suggest this solution in their ruling against Southworth, so no more lawsuits.
Aside from giving students some control over their bills, a less obvious advantage would be the effect on the groups. Instead of concentrating their efforts on getting friends elected and enemies ousted, groups would spend their energy getting their message to students, “Here’s who we are. Here’s what we offer. Here’s the environment we hope to engender.” Nothing would do more to remedy the rift between student organizations and the student body.
This week you’ll see us wandering around campus, clipboards in hand with attatched to a petition to put the referendum on the April ballot. Please sign it. If the referendum succeeds, it would mandate that council implement the reform. Thus far, the prevailing sentiment couldn’t be clearer. Students are sick of the nonsense their student government has become and want some control over their skyrocketing seg-fee bills.
Art Blair is a graduate student in Physics who should be writing his thesis instead of getting entangled in campus politics. He is an L&S grad representative on student council and finance committee and looks forward to promptly ending his political career when this referendum passes and is implemented.
