Despite a veto by ASUO President Jared Axelrod, the Student Senate allocated $16,000 Wednesday night for a concert next fall by the Afro-Latin band Ozomatli. While the group’s sound may be appealing, it does not merit spending so much of our surplus incidental-fee funds on a single event, which we pointed out last week.
The concert is intended as a multicultural event that will be accompanied by information for students about support resources on campus. Yet some students recently called for giving the Bias Response Team paid staff to render it more effective. Wouldn’t giving the BRT or a similar organization a paid staff be a worthy possibility for this large sum?
Perhaps more disturbing than the Senate’s decision to make this massive allocation, which sets a poor precedent for future years, is Axelrod’s lack of true fiscal responsibility regarding the issue. He vetoed it under the guise of considering whether it would be possible to charge admission for students and community members to help defray the costs to students. Yet all but one of the senators who were members of the slate on which Axelrod ran in this year’s election voted for the allocation. While Axelrod probably does not entirely control the actions of these senators, whom he helped elect, he should have realistically known before the meeting that the measure would pass. It’s too bad he didn’t step up and influence these senators to press the idea of charging admission.
Only a handful of senators dissented from the vote, and we applaud them for not participating in the group-think mentality that garners the body so much criticism from us on a near-weekly basis.
According to a memo distributed Wednesday that contains advice from past senators on tips for dealing with the media, administrators and the ASUO Executive, the “ODE will not care what (senators) think unless it makes you or Senate look bad. Be aware of this difficult.”
We would rather write editorials praising its fiscal responsibility and vision for this University, but the Senate has done its fair share of boneheaded things in the past, such as considering the Iran resolution. We hope that will not be the case during the upcoming year.