Public authority status is still months away for UW-Madison, but students are already thinking about how to fill their seat on the Board of Trustees.
If all goes according to plan, Gov. Scott Walker will appoint 11 of the board's 21 members. The other 10 members will be a mix of faculty, interested parties and, of course, at least one currently enrolled student.
So who's best for the job? How do we even begin to decide what makes a candidate qualified? This lone college student will sit on a board that has authority over pressing issues like tuition, salaries and shared governance. It's no small task.
Student government is throwing around a lot of ideas. Some members think the sitting ASM chair should fill the spot temporarily following the passage of the governor's budget.
This plan would give students and the administration more time to establish a process for filling the spot in the future.
And that process is important. We could theoretically make it a free-for-all election and put the seat up to a campus-wide vote—that's what some competing universities with a similar board choose to do. But in many cases you'll see individual candidates spend well over $10,000 to sway the student electorate, with the winner sometimes unprepared for the complexities of the board.
While a fresh perspective is not necessarily a bad thing, an open election could be a popularity contest. Should someone win the seat because they have a grip of dough and a lot of friends? Opening the floodgates of campaign spending automatically marginalizes students without access to competing funds.
The most logical solution would be an election with restrictions. Normally I'm a proponent of merit selection, but given the circumstances, I don't think ASM alone should dictate who sits on the board. There's just enough backroom politics in student government to make a colossal mistake.
But there is room for ASM involvement. Just as it established a commencement speaker fund earlier this year, student council could make a student representative fund. ASM could hold interviews to weed out the unqualified, or it could use a primary voting system with a certain number of applicants moving on to the next round. Either way, the final candidates would receive funding for a campus-wide election with the caveat they won't spend their own money. That would eliminate the threat of silencing a less affluent contestant. It also gives student government—and the campus community—time to learn what each candidate brings to the table.
It might seem like a lot of hoops to jump through, but the selection process shouldn't be easy. First of all, the student will occupy the seat for two years, so it's not like this lengthy election would take place year in and year out. And, more importantly, we shouldn't select someone who's not up to the challenge. After all, the student will have huge responsibilities.
Chief among them is maintaining—and hopefully strengthening—shared governance between the administration and students. The phrase ""no taxation without representation"" comes to mind, especially considering the impact public authority status and dwindling state funding will have on tuition.
To date, Chancellor Biddy Martin has pledged a tuition increase of only 8.5 percent, even when faced with $125 million in cuts from the state. But she's also vowed to protect lower- income students by increasing financial aid awareness. Under the New Badger Partnership, she'll have the power to do both. And it's up to the student on the Board of Trustees to hold her accountable.
But tuition isn't the only fee UW-Madison charges students.
Every year we pay over $1,000 in segregated fees on top of tuition, with a majority of this money creating a $30-plus million non-allocable budget under the jurisdiction of the chancellor. The student representative on the Board of Trustees needs to fight for more authority over this budget to ensure student dollars are going to worthy causes, not just the chancellor's pet projects.
In the coming months we will see a great opportunity to strengthen the student voice. ASM needs to make sure a prepared candidate sits on the board, and an open election is not the answer. Sure, we can put it to a vote eventually, but let's first create a calculated selection process that guarantees qualified, genuine representation. Millions of student dollars depend on it.
Dan Tollefson is a senior majoring in English. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
