When Chancellor Biddy Martin brought her Madison Initiative for Undergraduates before the student body last year, she insisted that every doubloon raised by the tuition hike be accountable to students. The proposals being considered for funding were to be posted online and two committees, one composed exclusively of students, were to scrutinize the projects and advise Martin on their worth.
It was with these assurances of transparency and accountability that this editorial board — and many other student groups — tendered its endorsement of Martin’s plan. The first round of proposals went smoothly enough, but problems began to surface once the 29 proposals of last fall turned into 114 this spring. The proposals are only electronically available to the public upon request, though that’s a small transgression, and given the volume of data, a (somewhat) forgivable one.
Hiding behind poorly formed arguments of closed meetings however, is not.
On Monday, a Badger Herald reporter was barred from an MIU Oversight Committee meeting after an impromptu hallway tribunal declared the proceedings closed. Seeking clarification, the Herald has received several answers – none valid – from university administration, as well as some egregious insults to not only established state law, but also our intelligence.
Originally, the board claimed the discussion of personnel issues necessitated a private conference. While this is true for meetings regarding evaluations of specific, individual performance, that was not the case in Monday’s meeting. The only personnel issues that should have been discussed were those dealing with whether to add positions, not questions of who should be hired and why.
Later on, the provost’s office offered an official justification for closing the meeting: the committee was advisory, and therefore not subject to the open meetings law. On its surface, the explanation is at best tenuous, as the board appears to be a shared governance body, composed of students, faculty and staff. A 1989 opinion from the state Attorney General closes the case, explicitly stating advisory bodies of government entities (which does include the university and its subunits) are bound by the Wisconsin open meetings law. Although some may claim the MIU Oversight Committee is not a body created by specific “rule” or “order” of the university, Board of Regents Resolution 9608 indicates otherwise, approving the Madison Initiative and the formation of this committee by name.
At best, this is just a misunderstanding (though a very perplexing one, if that is the case), and, at worst, a flagrant betrayal of student trust. The entire campus assented to the $1000 tuition increase over four years, not just in anticipation of the programs that would be supported, but with expectations of how those programs would be determined.
Although most students couldn’t care less about CALS advising or first-year interest groups, it inevitably will matter to a few, and they should be able to have access — within reason — to the process. Simply brushing a reporter aside and telling her to read the committee’s decisions in two weeks hardly matches the “sifting and winnowing” ideal, and definitely doesn’t fit in with the ground rules Martin set down a year ago.
The question isn’t only about the open meeting law. As far as we’re concerned, committee members are wrong and are therefore subject to a fine from the state.
Rather, the problem is the administration’s apparent lack of commitment to the ideals it set forth and the attitude of privilege surrounding the MIU Oversight Committee. It is time for the university to decide if all that rhetoric about transparency, accessibility and student involvement was genuine, or just a scheme to squeeze us for another $250 a semester.
