Since its establishment more than three years ago, the Student Fee Defenders and others have continuously praised our student fee distribution system here in Madison as completely fair and viewpoint neutral. Last week, several events raised serious questions about this claim.
On Wednesday, Pete McCabe, a Student Services Finance Committee (SSFC) representative, laid out reasons why students should not have to pay for the Multicultural Student Coalition’s (MCSC) presence on this campus. He brought these concerns to his colleagues on SSFC and encouraged them to deny MCSC funding eligibility.
On that same day, in an op-ed piece in this newspaper, SSFC Chair Aaron Werner cited a recent article in the Madison Observer, an MCSC publication, to illustrate MCSC’s attempt to systematically exclude certain students. He made the case that MCSC violates SSFC eligibility requirement three, which specifies that all students must have the ability to participate in the organization. During his presentation, McCabe echoed these arguments.
In an interview I conducted, MCSC executive staff member Theresa Vidaurri responded to claims made by McCabe, Werner, and others. The survival of her organization depended on the ability to answer those charges, at least to the satisfaction of a majority of SSFC members.
Vidaurri commented on the focus of MCSC, saying, “They [critics of MCSC] feel that the Multicultural Student Coalition is aimed toward students of color, but that’s not our whole entire focus. Our focus is diversity education in all matters, and that includes students of color and majority students, as majority students are, right now, white students.” She felt that many students interpret MCSC’s mission statement to suit their own purposes. Also, MCSC’s eligibility application states that all students who attend UW-Madison are considered members of MCSC.
Later, Vidaurri commented on a recent article written by UW graduate Carl Camacho in the Madison Observer. In this article, Camacho labeled conservative students who served on SSFC last year a “reckless white supremacist mob.”
To this, Vidaurri replied, “The member who wrote that (Camacho) was not writing as an MCSC member, he was writing as an ASM representative and as a former SSFC member who saw the process from beginning to end.” She said that the Observer provides a forum for opinions that the campus newspapers would not usually publish, and that those opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the MCSC staff.
In the case of MCSC eligibility, two directly conflicting cases were laid out for all students to see. The question became which side the SSFC majority would support. For those who follow SSFC and their decisions, the answer came with little surprise.
SSFC representatives who supported MCSC and its agenda swallowed their answers hook, line, and sinker. Those who wanted to apply scrutiny to MCSC raised legitimate questions, and ultimately, two of these SSFC representatives voted against eligibility for MCSC. In the case of MCSC (and any other organization), an SSFC representative can make up his or her mind well ahead of time and simply offer one case or the other as reasoning.
“You can’t go into a situation and be viewpoint neutral. It’s very hard to do that — everybody goes with motives. You ran for a reason,” said Vidaurri, an ASM representative herself. She also suggested that SSFC members should go through “diversity, sexual orientation, and gender training” so that they can better evaluate an organization’s services rather than their constituents and beliefs.
While wrongly suggesting sensitivity training as a solution, Vidaurri is absolutely correct about one point: virtually everyone who runs for ASM or SSFC runs for a reason. The status quo defenders always answer by noting that all SSFC denials must be accompanied by an explanation which a third party can examine.
Last week, the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS) Student Council received such a denial from SSFC. In an official statement explaining their decision, SSFC cited four violations.
One of these violations included the SSFC finding that CALS Student Council failed to provide a written purpose or mission statement (criterion four). The entire official SSFC explanation for not accepting the CALS Student Council’s five-point mission statement reads, “They do not have a clear written mission statement. The mission statement is very broad/vague.” The explanations for the other criteria violations were equally nebulous.
This explanation shows that SSFC and Chair Werner learned an important lesson from last year’s Student Judiciary rulings: make your eligibility decisions at will, but choose your words for explaining them carefully. More importantly, however, this shows, once again, what a farce and what a sham the implementation of viewpoint neutrality into this university’s funding system has become.
Mark Baumgardner ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in electrical engineering.
