Chancellor John Wiley overstepped his boundaries when he issued a memo effectively retracting the money allocated by the Student Services Finance Committee to seven campus groups for off-campus rent.
Rather than making clear recommendations to the SSFC and allowing the agency to make decisions based on its evaluations of the situations of each group, he made a blanket authoritarian mandate. The mandate publicly impugned the SSFC's capacity as a student governance body and the independence of the groups in question in one fell swoop.
Wiley's memo was a warning to the entire campus about a potential hole in SSFC policy through which segregated fees could pour in waste if not plugged. Providing money for groups to pay off-campus rent is unsound policy that creates a slippery slope.
Any student of economics could tell you it is a sounder financial move to invest in property you own than to pay rent. While these groups cannot exactly buy up their own office buildings, by giving them money to pay rent for off-campus buildings, we lose money by not investing it in something that retains value.
There is obviously value in giving the groups something they need to function, but paying for somewhere off-campus is only a stop-gap solution, a fact even Wiley alludes to in his note that gives all the groups a one-year exemption to the policy he's enforcing.
This money should be placed in campus buildings—such as the building under construction where University Square once stood—that the university at least partly controls, so the rent money goes toward maintaining buildings the entire campus can enjoy. Lining a local owner's pocket does nothing for the campus as a whole.
Enabling groups to relocate their offices also reduces their relevance to the UW-Madison campus. It spreads these groups out, making it difficult for many students to find them or even relate them as part of the university.
This limits the access of the average student to the organization, essentially removing many students from the group's services and activities through physical distance.
The relevance the groups have to the campus geographically and in terms of accessibility by the student body makes for a stronger case that these student groups are less valuable to the campus as a whole, feasibly endangering their access to the seg-fee funding completely.
Wiley was acting on sound principle in his memo to the SSFC. Paying off-campus rent with fees paid by the student body does not promote a campus that benefits from the investment each student must make equally.
However, his assertion the SSFC operates under a ""murky political environment"" equates to an inability to make any sound decision and has provoked an understandably violent reaction that has ignored any grain of validity his line of reasoning held.
Ignoring the reality these groups face by forcing them to find new office space and overriding the authority of student-elected officials undermines the sort of discourse he should be trying to stimulate.
Had his office issued a notice of his concerns to the committee and left them to deal with the realities of each group's situation, his concerns for the campus as a whole could have actually benefited the student body, rather than making for another headline of Wiley disregarding student independence.
