Month: March 2010

This year on Insiders we’ve tried to stay away from ranty editorials but this time I can’t resist.

I was brought into this commerce fee thing innocently enough, when Alex told me about a CUS meeting where they would be discussing the fee. I was happy to stay out of it and let him deal with it all until I got a message saying that he couldn’t make the meeting and could I please go take notes in his place? So I went, and got my first taste of the CUS.

From the beginning, the process behind running the referendum has been poisoned and as is widely acknowledged, is an inititative of the Dean, not the CUS. Most, if not all, of the info the CUS went on appeared to have come in the form of “Dean Dan said…” and the CUS blindly trusted anything that was said. I understand that Dan is a popular fellow. I had the pleasure of working with him on a university committee considering NCAA membership. He’s charismatic and persuasive. But it doesn’t mean he’s necessarily on your side.

So as far as the comments Dean Dan made today, we had given Dan an outline of what we suggested we would like to see him talk about. That being said, Dean Dan is obviously in a position where he wants, you know, he is personally invested in this and we really wanted him to share the information that he shared with us two Fridays ago. So he shared that information with students as well. He went on to share his own personal biases as well.

Connor McGauley, incoming CUS President
From March 1, 2010 CUS meeting

Commerce students are before the ballot now. There are some good backgrounders out there. We scrapped ours because frankly, it was too dry. The important lessons coming from the history are:

1. The rhetoric behind accreditation grew stronger with time. At first it was not being mentioned, then there were short references, now there’s direct citations from documents no one’s seen.

2. Fun accounting tricks took place. The development was “phased” and then a lot of the project was shifted into Phase 1 slowly in what is most likely an attempt to maximize funds from the first CUS referendum. This includes things that didn’t need to be there, like A/V.

3. Phase 2, in a sense, has to happen. If only Phase 1 occurs, its costs go up because building code and seismic improvements are in Phase 2. When you’re tearing down walls to upgrade to code, you may as well save money and make those walls pretty. It would be really stupid to not do Phase 2.

The fact that ‘phasing’ is irrelevant if you have to do both is beside the point. What’s important to note from the history is that there is this financial model that was created by the administration, and they’re relying on the inflexibility they built in to get a desired outcome. It’s like arguing “we shouldn’t stop the train, because I deliberately broke the breaks.”

This piece goes into the nature of tuition and student fee accounting, what’s wrong with this question, and the bad precedents it is setting.