They killed it. Its own people finally killed it.
With the overwhelming electoral opposition to ASM’s opt-out amendment to the segregated-fee system last week, Student Council will likely interpret the result as a mandate for mandatory fees. A record voter turnout appears to put a particular cap on the vox populi.
But a wiser evaluator would note the context in which this referendum failed, the inexcusable politicization and divisive atmosphere that threatened to kill the opt-out plan time after time before it finally fell. The Badger Party’s no-holds-barred approach to promoting and ensuring its insular agenda did more to destroy opt-out than any maneuvers by its opponents.
Will students ever be able to choose how to spend their own money?
Not as long as ASM remains clogged and controlled with irresponsible iconoclasts, sparring and even warring with one another, filibustering and tabling motions, sealing and finally violating their own ideologies in the name of victory. Only the spoils went another way this time, to a sideline no less absurdly political but perhaps less burdened without the corrupting challenge of proponing a measure to shake the whole system.
Opt-out lost because it had more enemies than friends — because the people who were against it knew what was at stake and organized to save their interests.
Because the people who were for it resorted to underhanded tactics to draw a house of support that turned out to be built with pieces of paper — or at least the dubious signatures scrawled upon them. Because those proponents never bothered to turn that 10 percent of support into a concrete ground system to educate the whole student body and stamp this effort as a popularly induced call for self-determination.
Scores of Badger Party e-mails saturated the insider networks within ASM during the last few weeks, revealing despicable personal attacks and sleazy wheeling-dealing for signatures and, eventually, votes. Surely the rest of Student Council is mired in as much filth. Badger Party’s silliness was not news; it was just embarrassing.
Opt-out was not a measure to de-fund student organizations. It was not a measure to eliminate student groups. It was an attempt to give individuals a hand in determining where their money went, without leaving groups at the mercy of students who don’t care enough to opt in.
Opt-out lost because Badger Party did not care about giving students a chance to distribute their own funds; Badger Party only cared about winning. Or, more accurately, its members cared about making sure the other side lost. They made that clear as profanely as possible.
Favorers of mandatory fees led voters to believe opt-out was an attack on student organizations. Opt-out’s proponents never made it clear otherwise, partly because some of them wanted it to be just that. Uninvolved students never knew the difference, and now it does not matter if they voted or not, or which side they chose.
If students ever want a chance to resurrect a system for self-determination, the action must come from — or at least along with — a popular mandate for choice. This page has said it before: Student government fails because interpersonal grievances and self-aggrandizing politics interfere with real student interest. If anyone ever decides to go after mandatory fees again, that group must forget about being derisive and divisive long enough to engage other groups and truly demonstrate why giving students a choice is the only way for organizations to exist with the security of legitimate funding.
