Walking through Library Mall this fall, I saw a flyer for WHAM (Women Happily Advocating Masturbation), and the true uniqueness of Madison hit me once again. As students at UW-Madison, we are continually exposed to debate beyond the classroom through the efforts of student organizations. The Madison campus experience relies upon these groups to enable participation in our community dialogue and to allow our education to consist of more than lectures and exams. In addition, student organizations are the backbone of the service and support for students that this campus desperately needs.
Since student organizations are integral to campus life, it is important to understand the system that supports them. Students elect representatives to our student government, the Associated Students of Madison, to make informed choices surrounding these important funding decisions. Each year the Student Services Finance Committee and the ASM Finance Committee spend countless hours determining budgets of student organizations like the Greater University Tutorial Service, Sex Out Loud, Asian Pacific American Council, WHAM, Campus Crusade for Christ and many more.
Students control their student government, participate in student organizations and decide the budgets for the services they want and need. Students are the best body to decide student fees and distribute them through the democratic system that students created.
As students at this university, we are incredibly powerful in our ability to determine our needs and devise the means to meet and address them.
The debate regarding the student fee system is fundamentally tied to disputes over student involvement and power in their education. Despite the fact that more than 75 percent of all student fees goes toward major auxiliary services like University Health Services, the Wisconsin Union and Recreational Sports, the focus remains on student initiatives like student government, the bus pass and the many student organizations and services.
The student fee system continues to be controversial precisely because of the open forum of ideas which it provides and sustains. Within this forum, students actively participate in their education by exploring a variety of ideas that are different from their own. These opportunities should be expected from an institute of higher learning. As students we should be challenged to expand our knowledge of what we believe and what we do not. Exposure to new ideas, experiences and different understandings is the true application of learning.
The open forum of ideas is a hotly contested site of exploration and implicitly generates differences of opinions that are difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. The solution, however, cannot be to eliminate the forum in which free speech is heard. Only by continually exhausting the opportunities for differences of opinions can the true educational mission of this university be upheld: students determining their own opinions in the vast continuum that exists.
Attacks against the student fee system have caused confusion regarding the fee system's purpose and success. Debates over which student organizations serve which students remain heated and divisive. Yet, every organization adding to the open forum of ideas benefits each and every student at this university. Facing new ideas and differing viewpoints is a difficult means of learning that challenges each and every student to consider her or his own viewpoint and develop a cohesive argument. As students, we should be outraged when viewpoints are marginalized as our entire education process suffers from their absence.
Students have the right to hear the viewpoints made available through the current student service fee system. Students have the right to a campus that is filled with opportunities for involvement and constant challenges to their understanding of the world. We, as students, are invested in this university for more than just our attendance in classrooms; we are here to participate in the accumulation of knowledge and debate. We are here to ensure that the ideals upon which this university was founded are maintained: that \the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone truth can be found.""
