The state budget situation, leaving state funding for the UW System at an uncertain level, prompted UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley to ask the Associated Students of Madison to reduce student organization budgets, Wiley said Monday.
According to Wiley's demands, allocable segregated fees which fund student organizations will only increase by 10 percent.
Segregated fees are divided into allocable and nonallocable, allocable being those that fund student organizations and nonallocable being those that fund other organizations, including University Health Services and the Wisconsin Union.
John Torphy, UW-Madison Vice Chancellor for Administration, had igorously forced"" representatives from groups funded by nonallocable segregated fees to keep their budget increases to the bare minimum, according to Wiley. As such, Wiley's demands to decrease the segregated fee budgets only apply to the allocable portion.
""I said earlier that I was proud of the way the students handled this whole situation,"" Wiley said. ""I thought ASM and the [Student Services Finance Committee] went by the book. ... It's exactly what students are supposed to do under our shared governance system.""
ASM Chair Jessica Miller said she had known for a few weeks that Wiley was going to ask for reductions in the budgets. She added she had not yet received a formal letter from Wiley asking ASM to do so, but expected one this week.
How ASM will go about meeting Wiley's demands is unclear, she said, since this is the first time a chancellor has altered the segregated fees budgets passed by ASM last semester. There is no set process for how ASM should revise the budgets after Wiley has looked at them, Miller said.
""If I were them, I would probably [make the cuts] across the board. That's not a recommendation. I'm just guessing,"" Wiley said.
Wiley said he was ""reluctant"" to substitute his judgment for the students' judgment and did not want to ""micromanage specific allocations.""
""I just thought symbolically, as well as in reality, having the allocable part of the seg fees go up by a large percentage ... was not good,"" he said.
Segregated fees budgets were originally passed by SSFC last semester with record increases for certain groups and then were passed unaltered by the ASM Student Council.
The state budget situation, which led to an increased awareness of the university's expenditures, began when Gov. Scott McCallum proposed a $50.5 million cut to the UW System. After amendments by the Joint Finance Committee and the Assembly, the cuts were increased to over $100 million.
Deliberation on the budget proposal began Monday within the state Senate, with Democrats pledging their support for the university, saying they would work to reverse cuts passed by the Assembly last month.
