In 1979 it was the Pail and Shovel Party. In 2000 it was the Ten Fat Tigers. And now, in 2010, we have the Madison People Organizing for Wisconsin Educational Rights slate.
MPOWER is an umbrella organization, encompassing ASM candidates from across campus and drawing support from several prominent seg-fee-funded organizations. Its platform calls for affordable education, a safe campus and student services that actually benefit students.
With 22 candidates running for positions across eight schools, the group has big plans for shaping ASM policies ranging from good to bad to already in progress. Unfortunately, most of its platform is skewed toward the last two.
Like For Accessibility Community and Empowerment of Students last year, MPOWER seems to be another narrow, activist group that is not concerned with serving the campus as a whole. Only this time, it seems to be composed of people who feel they should be getting seg fee money (even if they can’t justify it) rather than the remnants of a grassroots reform movements.
We’ll start with the good. Worth talking about are MPOWER’s plans to subsidize Human Papillomavirus vaccinations for students (we assume the ladies) and beef up Shared Governance Committee. And even though suing the university to recover ASM monies seized during the process of balancing the budget might not be the best idea, seeking some legal advice on the matter couldn’t hurt.
But the list ends there. Other good planks of the MPOWER platform have already been or are in the process of being addressed by the current ASM session. MPOWER suggested putting more segregated fees toward students, and SSFC is developing a campus services fund to do just that. MPOWER wants to give students legal information regarding tenant rights, and ASM is looking into contracting an outside organization (the Tenant Resource Center would seem to make sense). To top it all off, MPOWER wants to push for federal student loan reform. ASM already did that. We covered it. It passed.
Finally, there are the not-so-good ideas. Plans to rework the Student Activity Center allocation process — which was a mess this year because of viewpoint neutrality concerns — sound good, except MPOWER wants to make the process more subjective, opening it up to even more questions of impartiality.
Even more perplexing is the group’s simultaneous calls for fiscal solvency and increased SAFEcab service. Arguing “safety must be convenient,” the group advocates doubling the number of rides allotted per student per semester. Besides being expensive and rarely used, it begs the question: when is it about convenience, and when is it about not putting yourself in dangerous situations late at night out of reach of SAFEwalk, SAFEbus, city buses or regular cab companies more than six times a semester?
Equally insulting to the intelligence of the student body is MPOWER’s stance on other student services. A poorly veiled attack on SSFC for denying the Campus Women’s Center funding makes it seem as if MPOWER is just interested in grabbing money for allied student orgs. Another allusion to foisting diversity training on SSFC members only reinforces this impression.
MPOWER doesn’t seem to be intrinsically evil or bent on world domination, it’s just that they don’t have many good ideas, and several of the ones they do have aren’t even their ideas. And anyway, you don’t win a campaign based on “gender inclusive” bathrooms.
