As a dedicated member of the WSA for two years, I believe I am well informed in my criticism of this representative, at times bureaucratic, body. (Let me note that the WSA without doubt does a lot of good, too). To my most recent disappointment, the WSA at this past Sunday’s meeting managed (again) to be completely out of touch with student interest. Hopefully what I retell will make clear that the failings of the WSA cannot entirely be blamed on the administration but also on the elected student representatives.
At Sunday’s WSA meeting the assembly, debated the revised criteria that the Student Budgetary Committee (SBC) would go by when funding or not funding student groups. The debate centered specifically on a list of what the SBC does not fund. In addition to what one would expect on such a list, for instance “Alcoholic beverages, tobacco products, controlled or illegal substances,” there was an unassuming provision of “ [does not fund] any request not initially received in an SBC hearing at least two weeks prior to the date of the event.” Now as much as I like to emulate the inflexibility of upper-level management, I pushed to alter the wording such that it would read something along the lines of strongly favoring requests received two weeks in advance. The members of the SBC argued that the funding of any request received less than two weeks in advance was a slippery slope, such that it was necessary to be so tightfisted with their money. In response to my reasoning that there might be cases where seeking funding two weeks out would not be possible for one reason or another, rather than coming up with a solution in the best interest of the student body, rumination continued on the slippery slope idea. When I called this rule red tape and bureaucracy, your very own SBC student representative (Alex Halpern Levy) agreed, saying that “sometimes bureaucracy is necessary.” His argument was that the handling of the $523,000 student activities budget was no small task and required ironfisted measures such as these. The other SBC representatives in attendance (Tian “Jerry” Ai, Nicole Ippoliti, JZ Golden), though not directly admitting to the need for bureaucracy, still supported such a rule. Of the other WSA members in attendance, with the exception of myself and Nora Connor, no one else had the sense to speak up in the defense and interest of student clubs.
Now that Nora and I have tried and failed to correct such an egregious oversight, this sadly leaves you, the student, to speak up and represent yourself. The SBC has proven that it has the ability to support flexibility (see other SBC criteria for funding), so the task at hand is fortunately not impossible.
Leave a Reply