The student government heard a presentation on a fund to bring high profile speakers to campus for commencement ceremonies and postponed suspending the contract status process during a meeting Thursday evening.
The resolution to create the fund was presented to the Associated Students of Madison Student Services Finance Committee by SSFC Chair Matt Manes and was endorsed by the council last semester.
Steven Olikara, former Diversity Committee chair and University of Wisconsin junior, said the fund would bring notable speakers to commencement ceremonies.
Olikara said he had been working on creating the fund or something similar to it for about two years because it was clear to him UW was falling behind peers’ institutions in the ability to attract prominent speakers.
“I have been focused on elevating the celebration for our graduates, really creating a celebration of high caliber,” Olikara said.
He added it will help UW compete with its peers, bring notable speakers to campus and make the school more visible nationally and internationally.
Although the committee generally supported the idea of a commencement speaker fund, some members expressed concerns about the amount of money students would be charged in segregated fees to support the fund.
The amount that students will be charged has not been set yet, but charging each student one to two dollars per year would bring in $35,000 to $75,000 in revenue for the fund, Manes said.
Olikara said the fund is still in its infant stage and the details are still yet to be determined, but the overall support for the fund has been promising. SSFC will discuss the fund further next week.
Manes also informed the committee of the notice ASM had received from Chancellor Biddy Martin about its contract status process.
Martin said the administration will no longer be any requests through the current contract status process because ASM does not currently have the power to generate and dictate the terms of the request.
Manes said the Wisconsin state government currently manages the terms of contracts with registered student organizations.
Manes said he wanted to discuss suspend contract status while the committee worked on fixing the process.
Representative Jair Alvarez asked the committee to postpone making the decision to suspend it until he had time to finish researching possible ways to resolve the issue.
The committee decided to postpone discussing suspending contract status until Monday’s meeting.
The committee also addressed a couple wage policy violations committed by Supporting Peers in Laid-back Listening and Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan.
Both groups were warned, and MEChA was asked to right a plan of action because it was its second offense of the same nature. In both cases, the organizations had employees that logged hours over the accepted amount.
Manes said the current policy does not consider the context or severity of the offense and enforces harsh penalties for innocuous offenses.
“In my mind, when you see a policy being violated again and again and again, you should go back and evaluate if the policy is what it should be,” Manes said.
The committee also approved the SSFC’s budget at $177,248.
