The College Fix

It’s one thing for student leaders to ask for input from the students they represent before drafting proposals to the Regents. It’s another thing for student leaders to disregard that input from students in favor of the wishes of administrators. It’s quite another thing for student leaders to ask for student input only after they have already offered the collective student body’s stamp of approval to a fee proposal that is exactly what administrators want, with no meaningful input from average students.

That’s exactly what’s happened at ASU: the Associated Students of ASU Downtown are holding a survey event this week to seek student input on proposed $100 fee increases — despite the fact that ASASUD President Christian Vasquez signed a letter in full support of the ASU administration’s tuition and fee proposal way back on March 21.

That letter[pdf] was signed by all five presidents of Arizona State graduate and undergraduate student governments — and only now, apparently, do the leaders at ASU-Downtown see fit to ask students their thoughts on the administration’s proposal. (We Wildcats are deliberately unaware of most churning in Tempe — if any of the student governments did solicit student input on these topics, please let us know.)

This blatant hypocrisy is made only more Beckettian by the fact that by the time this event concludes on Thursday, the Board of Regents will have already set the fee rates for next year, and there is no way these surveys could inform that decision at all.

UA’s own ASUA conducted a survey at least chronologically before releasing their fee proposal, but with distinct ideas about what the results of that survey should be allowed to reveal. The student leaders of ASU did not grant even this farcical courtesy. Student leaders, despite their posturing, are less interested in drafting proposals based on what students say than based on what administrators say is “realistic.” Student proposals should serve to present the Regents with a shining glimpse of student input in as raw a form as possible, not to pull a dull lump of meaningless, dusty precipitate from the crucible of a self-interested administration’s fee-grubbing alchemy and pretend that it’s solid student-voice gold.

President Fritze said yesterday, “May I remind you, ASUA was the only undergraduate student government in the state that encouraged the regents to minimize tuition and fee increases.”

Just because ASUA’s proposal offers comparative opposition does not mean it offers meaningful opposition, just as being the smartest student in a remedial class ought not be a testament to one’s academic prowess. President Fritze may be correct that only ASUA advocated for fees to be set lower than administration proposals, but it doesn’t make the the fact that student voice in Arizona has eroded to bedrock any rosier, and does not excuse the fact that every various associated students has failed to associate with students in a meaningful, respectful matter on the issue of tuition and fees.

Conducting a survey that has no opportunity inform an organization’s decision in the least makes a farce of student representation, and while conducting a survey only to manipulate the data may be better, it still isn’t good.

Anna Swenson blogs at the Desert Lamp. She is a member of the Student Free Press Association.

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