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.