Tonight Emma Kallaway will have a chance to build a legacy for her ASUO presidency, and the ASUO Senate will show how much it cares to advocate on behalf of students.
The test comes in the form of the Senate’s first resolution, a statement of opposition to the University’s closed process for new construction along the Willamette River, which one resolution supporter half-jokingly described as a middle finger to the administration.
At least the resolution could be considered such these days. In its heyday, the ASUO used to march, organize, boycott and occupy Johnson Hall for just about anything. Today’s student leaders engage in substantive projects like filling drunk bellies on Halloween to prevent arrests and riots, a noble cause that might have led to an interesting story if included with the pizza feed was an EMU ballroom filled with sword swallowers and a few clowns.
Event organizing is an important part of the ASUO, but Halloween committees and movie screenings don’t make a student movement.
A step toward exercising student power could come from a collective statement by elected representatives of the student body that says students should be included in decisions that will poorly reflect the University they attend and blight a riverfront they enjoy. Whether Senate has any chance of passing the resolution is another matter.
Kallaway says she has been e-mailing plenty of information to senators and held a briefing session to get them acquainted with the issue. “A lot of times resolutions fail because senators feel they don’t have enough information,” she said.
Kallaway needs to make sure senators know plenty about the resolution before going into the meeting. This issue fits quite nicely into her agenda items for the year — finalized just a couple of weeks ago — focusing on safety and a sustainable campus. Thus far, she can count as part of a safety agenda her efforts on Halloween, her participation in improving lighting on campus and her testimony in favor of giving the Department of Safety greater citation powers on campus. (Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any comments about that Chinese student who got tasered in September, which should be a safety concern for students.)
The Riverfront Research Park is on University property, and plans for developing it have drawn the ire of Eugene citizens and students for two decades. It seems likely Kallaway will get no greater opportunity to join (perhaps help lead?) a major sustainability cause. And time is running out. The city is accepting comments for the next week and a half, and Senate will take at least two weeks to pass the resolution. Tonight a majority vote will send the resolution to rules committee; next week the support of two-thirds of senators will be needed to pass it.
It’s not clear whether the votes are there yet. Former ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz has been organizing behind the scenes on this issue for quite some time; he brought the current executive, reporters and others to a meeting about the riverfront development during the summer. Perhaps he will be twisting in a few arms for the resolution, though he doesn’t want to put his face on it publicly.
Senate President Nick Gower said the vote will show him much about this Senate and individual members’ “threshold” for resolutions. Some senators have a high threshold — that is, they are willing to entertain only resolutions about major issues affecting a vast majority of students on campus. Others are satisfied with resolutions that affect students “in an indirect manner,” he said.
After tonight, we’ll have a better idea of how open this Senate is to speaking for students who elected (most of) them and how far Kallaway will push to be a leader on the issue.
Budget season begins tonight
The Programs Finance Committee and Department Finance Committee will present their requests for how much they would like their budgets to grow this year. The PFC is requesting an increase of 3.5 percent over last year’s budget, or $38,675 in growth for programs after the cost of maintaining current services. The executive is recommending PFC receive a smaller increase of 2.34 percent, which would equal only $17,823 in growth for more than 100 programs.
In the past few years, that would have been considered a paltry increase and could have elicited cries of discrimination against underrepresented students. Kallaway and former PFC chairman Sen. Nick Schultz don’t expect to see those sorts of protests tonight.
“We’re just a different ASUO than we were a few years ago, financially,” Kallaway said.
Thanks to the removal of the Career Center from the ASUO’s budget, DFC will ask for a lower budget than it received last year while increasing its actual budget.
Where’s Aranda?
One more thing: Where is Xavier Aranda, the social science appointee who couldn’t be confirmed until the Constitution Court clarified the rules? He didn’t show up last week, and there was some uncertainty Tuesday whether he would be come to Senate tonight.
“If we don’t get it taken care of this week, they should just appoint someone else,” one senator suggested.
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Testing the waters of student advocacy
Daily Emerald
November 10, 2009
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