Student Council - Wednesday 1/27

Tonight's Student Council meeting was predicted to go only ten minutes by Representative Paulson. It is never that easy with a Student Council, though.

First, a recap of all of the night's preceding can be found via the ASM press office.

Academic Affairs Chair Jonah Zinn proposed a piece of "legislation" (I put it in quotes because I really don't believe that ASM has the right to legislate) that mandates that ASM will join in the Haiti Relief efforts. Of course, there was hardly any debate about the act, but Finance Chair Beemsterboer did raise some interesting points about the place of ASM. My question is: is that something that should be mandated or is it really just implied since ASM has already started a Relief Day effort?

Also, Tyler reminded the Council for the 50th time that he read 1400 pages of MIU proposals.

We wrapped up by 7:30, not ten minutes but still pretty impressive.

What's Going On?

Its the second week back, which means that its time to get back in the gear of things. Thus, here is your update of things going on in the campus community.

ASM, WISPIRG, and United Council of UW schools have teamed up for a Day of Action for Haiti. We will run the numbers on what it raises later on, but in the meantime, participate!

SSFC heard the ASM Internal Budget on Monday night. The debate will likely be contentious on Thursday, but the finalized results are yet to be seen. It will be interesting to watch this develop.

Student Council meets tomorrow, and you can tune in here for updates as they come.

That's all for now. Happy Tuesday!

Madison, Comparatively

This past weekend, members of SSFC and I attended the second annual SUFAC Summit for the University of Wisconsin schools system. SUFAC, standing for Segregated University Fee Allocation Committee, is the technical term for SSFC and represents the official student allocation institution as delineated in University policies, and this conference represented the meeting of individual SUFACs to meet and discuss policies.

I won't bore you with the intricacies of other University SUFAC operations--nor will I explain the exceptional nerd-talk that develops when dozens of like-minding individuals get together and discuss seg fees--but I would like to expound on one fact that became excruciatingly obvious once the conference was underway. UW-Madison, comparatively, has by far the most complex (and arguably most powerful) SUFAC in the UW system. Save for maybe Milwaukee, Madison represents the only multi-faceted and highly refined system of allocating segregated fees; most other schools, no offense intended, operate similar to ASM's Finance Committee but likely allocate less.

Anecdotally, the evidence was all there. The dozens of questions for me from other Universities (one school even asked what Southworth was) and the raised eyebrows at our internal budget alone indicate that SSFC monetarily contributes more money via seg fees than any other school. (It is worth noting that UW-Madison has 40,000 students while some schools have less than 6000.) There is perhaps arguments to be made on the power and influence of individual SUFACs, but one fact remains unequivocally clear: UW-Madison's SSFC has more responsibilities dollar-wise than almost all committees in the UW system.