When I first heard of the For Accessibility, Community and Empowerment of Students slate of candidates for the Associated Students of Madison, I expected their platform to be pretty radical. After all “change” is the hot political buzzword of the moment, and they are the same people who led the Vote No Coalition’s overwhelming defeat of the new ASM constitution. Tales of the grassroots organizing potential of ASM’s Student Council leading student charges to barricade themselves in the chancellor’s office to demand an end to sweatshop labor had me ready for something totally different than the lackluster organization I had come to know in years past.
But when I actually took a look at their platform, it struck me as rather ordinary. There isn’t a single item listed that strikes me as something the current council would rule out completely. Any of the items listed that wouldn’t pass right now would fail not because there is a lack of true progressivism on ASM, but rather just because there are more efficient uses of our resources to accomplish the stated goals. In fact, almost every single program or policy listed exists in some form right now and all FACES plans to do is spend more money on them.
The first portion of the platform outlines their plans to get students involved by publicizing ASM activities and using the grassroots committees. In other words, they’re going to use committees that already exist and potentially create some kind of press office to publicize ASM function. Oh, wait, didn’t this year’s Student Council recognize this as a problem and create a press office in an attempt to correct it?
The next section on improving the affordability of higher education also doesn’t contain anything that — in principle — would face opposition from most students. FACES wants to create a shared governance committee to monitor spending and any tuition increase matched dollar for dollar with financial aid. Nothing too radical there — who doesn’t support increasing financial aid, and in light of the coming budget cuts, I would even venture to guess the university administration would welcome all the help they can get in trimming excess spending.
In this section, they also promise to use their position to directly lobby the university and state Legislature. This is one aspect of their platform that I wholeheartedly agree with. However, it is interesting to note that Mr. ASM-insider himself and former leading proponent of the new constitution, Jeff Wright, also seems to agree with them. In fact, he agrees with them so much about the need for increased student lobbying efforts that he took the time to go outside of ASM and found a group entirely devoted to that cause, the Wisconsin Student Lobby.
Their safety portion of the platform can basically be summarized by spending more money on things that already exist. Funding a sexual assault education campaign for students? It’s called PAVE. More bluelight safety phones? Check. Increasing awareness for currently existing rape hotline and more funding for SAFEride and SAFEwalk? It’s all in there.
On diversity, the platform calls for increased incentives for minority professors, more scholarships for minority students and the elimination of the extra fee to live on the multi-cultural residence floor. Once again the prescription is to throw more money we don’t have at already existing programs.
For the environment, they call to eliminate throwing away food from dining halls through a plan yet to be named, more recycling and improved energy efficiency. The latter two have been though of before and, in fact, we recently invested $29 million in improving the energy efficiency of our buildings.
And what campaign would be complete without a promise to be accountable, listen to constituents and be as transparent as possible? Certainly not this one.
The saddest part about the whole thing is not that FACES desires to increase spending on various programs while lowering tuition with no explanation of where the money will come from, but rather the state of the campus far-left. After losing out in spectacular, upset fashion on Brenda Konkel’s District 2 seat and not even managing to propel Katrina Flores’ District 8 campaign past Mark Woulf in the primary, the success of the Vote No Coalition was the one big victory of the year for campus progressives. However, this platform seems to suggest the involvement of the far-left in student government may be headed for a Wyndham Manning-esque irrelevancy within an already irrelevant organization.
Patrick Mcewen ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in nuclear engineering.
