Student Activity Fee Vs. a Bottle of Wine
If you happen to have missed all the Student Association’s publicity, I’ll let you in on some important info: Generation,among other things, is funded by your mandatory student activity fee, which is up for referendum this week. That’s right! We’re a small slice of the $69.75 you pay each semester for stuff to do besides studying. That’s where we get the GW noise to bring you interesting news, funky original music reviews, choice photographs, and (gasp) the personals.
Last semester Generation wrote about mismanaged money in SA. But we believe that despite some problems, the fee provides essential services to UB students’ lives.
It might not seem like much, but I know why $69.75 stirs up such emotion in students. It is the only part of our tuition that we have any control over. The suits in Albany can raise SUNY tuition, like they did one year ago, and we don’t know what that money is going to do for us. But the activity fee is the students’ money, and students are the ones who decide how to spend it.
Keeping the fee mandatory is a good thing for everyone, not just for Generation, The Spectrum, and Sub Board I, but for SA, too. They have something for everyone, and if they don’t, it’s not hard to start your own club. Some of their clubs are Tokyo cool, like the Outdoor Adventure club or Korean Folk Art Club.
They also have clubs you may not have any interest in, but that’s okay. Some of those clubs will give your dorky roommate a reason to step outside his dorm room and converse with other members of society. If Dance Dance Revolution Club didn’t get him out of your room at night, he might be stompin’ it up in there while you’re trying to get busy.
Out of that $69.75 you pay every semester $68.75 of it goes to the SA budget and $1 goes to The Spectrum. They take that money and give you 80 issues a year. The Spectrum fee is also up for referendum this week, and we’re voting to keep it. How would you feel to be a student at the only university that didn’t have a campus newspaper?
SA has also asked students to raise the fee by $10 per semester. Because of a lack of specifics on how SA would spend the extra money Generation can’t support the increase at this time. We here at Generation don’t think SA needs your extra 20 bucks. They are pulling in all kinds of cash from different places they didn’t have before. They cut $70,000 from the amount allocated to Sub Board I. That extra cash goes right back into SA’s budget every year. SA allocates $110,000 to staff stipends, more than any other SUNY school.
SA also told us that they cut their staff development budget by 300 percent when really they just shifted around some dough and will be spending $6,000 more on staff development this year, according to their proojected budgets.
I know those are only a few examples of money misuse, but even small things like that make me want to run up to the SA office and demand every penny of my student activity fee back. Perhaps SA should learn to pinch every penny they’ve got before coming and asking us to go without an extra case of beer.
But whatever your view, it doesn’t matter if you don’t get out of your room and vote. Your mom isn’t going to make you, and neither can I. Do remember: If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.
For Generation, this is
Morgan Grant
