 "Photo: Lucy Moore | Student Life")
Student Union Vice President of Administration Jeff Nelson presented details about plans to restructure the executive committees currently exempt from many of the rules of category student groups at the Student Union Treasury meeting on Tuesday.
Ten executive committees would be affected by this restructuring: KWUR, WUTV, Hatchet, Team 31, Campus Programming Council, Gargoyle Committee, Filmboard, Mr. WashU, Student Health Advisory Committee, and Connect 4.
The plan will focus on the implementation of the Equipment Committee, the Sports Board and the Social Programming Board, each of which are new or being restructured.
A Student Union (SU) Treasury committee, the Equipment Committee would be responsible for keeping track of the media equipment purchased by SU. It would also work with the Budget Committee to plan equipment purchases, repairs and upgrades.
Nelson emphasized the need to meet equipment allocations without associated fundraising expectations.
“This is important because equipment is a resource that belongs to the entire campus community and the entire student body. If we want everybody to use it, we should not place the burden of fundraising on a single group, but we should fund it in full,” Nelson said. “Groups buy [equipment], and it’s not stored in a central place.”
The Sports Board’s function would be similar to the current Sports Club Federation’s function, governing all sports clubs on campus. Because sports clubs go through different channels to gain recognition under SU, inconsistency affects the University categorization of such clubs—some sports clubs are Category 1 student groups, while others are part of the Sports Club Federation.
The Social Programming Board will enable the vice president of programming to help large-scale campus programming.
“We want to use this opportunity for Student Union to reassert itself into the conversation about how programming happens on campus,” Nelson said.
The Social Programming Board would deal with what Nelson calls the “over-programming” on campus right now, promoting synergy among various student groups on campus.
“We have a culture here where groups are self-interested. They’ve always been of the mindset to have the best programs for their student group,” Nelson said. “These groups have never been expected to program for the greater good.”
However, some members of Treasury were worried about the consequences of this restructuring.
SU Treasurer Brent Rubin, a junior, worried about SU becoming over-involved in the activities of student groups.
“A lot of this really scares me. The idea that SU should assert itself makes SU far too powerful. It might end up forcing collaboration between groups that really don’t have any desire to collaborate because they have strongly different institutional purposes. Isn’t it just going to be a huge fight over resources?”
In a similar reaction, General Manager of KWUR Dylan Suher, a junior, criticized the Equipment Committee’s potential effect on the student radio station.
“I think the students would be surprised to hear that SU envisions itself as some sort of greater programming body,” Suher said. “What this committee looks like is another layer of bureaucracy. You were elected to represent the students, to allocate the budget and to talk to the administration. You were not elected to run a radio station.”
Yet freshman Daniel Bernard, an SU Treasury representative, rebutted that criticism, noting the need for efficiency among the executive committees.
“I sat in a few budget allocation meetings and in student budgets, they were requesting money to rent projectors and rent screens,” Bernard said. “Student Union could have bought several screens and several projectors so I feel like we’re throwing a lot of student money down the tubes.”
SU executives hope implementation of the new committees can begin soon.
“Hopefully by next semester we can transition it in, [and] give the groups a semester to get used to it. By the next budget cycle, we should be in full swing,” Nelson said.
Nelson added that the task that lies before Student Union is not easy.
“It is difficult to alter the culture we have created in one year, but we must lay the seeds for change nonetheless,” he said. “We must gradually get to the place we want to be.”
