Push the Cart or Mobilize the Horse?
One could say that it’s been a while since I wrote a blog post.
As of late, an issue that ASM leaders dealt with over the summer has resurfaced as a point of contention in the Student Council. When Gov. Doyle proposed his state budget for FY10/11, it included a sweep of University System auxiliary enterprise accounts to help pay for Wisconsin Higher Education Grants. Due largely to miscommunication, state budget office snafus, and horribly varying definitions, ASM’s reserve funds were swept as well. The result: the student government has a $181,000 bill owed to the state. For financial aid.
To see why this may be a problem, see University policy F50, specifically section 3(e).
Unsure of whether ASM’s accounts were really auxiliary accounts, whether segregated fees could be used in this way, or how ASM would be able to pay the state after University officials told us to empty our reserves to avoid a sweep such as this, ASM leaders worked last summer to try to resolve the issue. To give the most cursory explanation possible, this resulted in a meeting with Vice Chancellor for Administration Darrell Bazzell back in November. At this meeting, the VCA and ASM leaders agreed to work on a Memorandum of Understanding between themselves to protect allocable segregated fees in the future and ensure other safeguards against bad processes such as these.
ASM leadership – Brandon Williams, Tom Templeton, Kurt Gosselin, and I – are working actively on this MOU with university administration. Despite some setbacks, I feel as if the process is going rather well. Though I’ve been criticized for “not standing up for students” by not (currently) raising a stink about the $181k taken from ASM’s reserve funds for this fiscal year, I feel that these arguments are short-sighted (briefly, Housing and Transportation Services would take drastic hits if ASM’s funds were to be exempted this year, and for that to happen at this point in the fiscal year is both unlikely and bad for students living in and working for Housing this year, and UW faculty and staff, who are the main source of revenue for TransServices.) What we have now is an opportunity to avoid this situation in the future. These are the conversations we need to have. The conversations of whether students should be refunded their $181,000 are worth having, but untimely. If there’s any possibility that student money would be refunded, it’s likely not to come about by sitting in a room, wearing a suit. Students would have to be antagonistic and apply serious SERIOUS pressure to the university for this to happen. If we do that now, UW administration may very well walk away from the MOU discussions we’re having at this point.
They say not to put the cart before the horse, but the cart’s what’s in front of us, so let’s push that to our satisfaction. We can mobilize the horse later.
For more information on this, specifically see Erik Paulson’s post.
