Editor,
Do you know how your student fees are spent, who is spending them and why?
The Student Fee Review Board is a committee of students selected by the ASUNM president and the GPSA president. It allocates about $8 million in student fees to departments across campus. The ASUNM president appoints three students to the board, and the GPSA president appoints two, based on the amount of fees the student body provides.
Configured this way, ASUNM has the control when it comes to allocating student money through recommendations to the Board of Regents.
ASUNM control of the student fees has created a conflict of interest. That's because, historically, it has been controlled by the Greek system. This has caused the manipulation of the SFRB decisions, for the purpose of augmenting certain programs' already enormous budgets.
Attempts to diversify the SFRB have been met with allegations of conflicts of interest. A bigger concern is that the SFRB has long been limited to few organizations and people at the undergraduate and graduate level.
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Some administrators have been complicit in UNM's flawed representative system, supporting the limited participation of students in GPSA and ASUNM. It is obvious that student government, specifically the SFRB, is kept under the control of ASUNM - thus, it also controls departments and administrators influential in deciding where student funds are allocated.
Many funds end up going to programs that do not directly serve students - unlike programs that do, such as free basketball tickets. The SFRB is supposed to serve as a program that allocates money in order to support a variety of student activities. It is meant to enhance the academic and intellectual environment at UNM.
The system of exclusion and lack of representation in student government is maintained on the pretext that few students participate because few students care. This limited and inaccurate view only propagates the sense of entitlement felt by groups and individuals who have the privilege and time to participate. With UNM being a mostly commuter school, limited student participation has been the norm for years.
Recently, a new student constituency, historically underrepresented, has taken a strong interest in ASUNM. This would be the Progressive Action Coalition. These students have been elected as senators, working hard to learn the process of student government in order to become active in its decision-making mechanisms.
It is imperative that this step toward a higher level of student participation be followed by election reforms. The ASUNM electoral process should be opened up to all students through online voting - the GPSA electoral process began doing this almost two years ago.
Granted, this conversion to online voting could take time. However, in the meantime, there needs to be more polling stations so the UNM ethnic centers are included and more students can vote.
As the electoral process expands, more student voices will be heard. This will lead to an improvement in the important process of allocating student fees. Students, not special interest groups, should determine how to properly allocate funds. This will also lead to diversity in representation and fair decisions that serve the interests of the greatest number of students.
Joseph Garcia
GPSA president
