Student government leaders are looking at other New York colleges as models to give students a greater voice in the university’s budgeting process.
Thursday night, students discussed a proposed budgeting program that would allow more student input. The group also discussed changes to UB’s smoke-free policy. Mike Brown, the University Council student representative, chaired the meeting.
Participatory budgeting, a process by which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget, has been successfully piloted at Brooklyn College and Queens College within the past two years, according to Brown.
Brown said many UB students are “still struggling to understand why fees are increasing and where the money from those fees is being sent.”
“I think this program could be an effective way to reach students that are not normally participating in student government or campus activities, and to let those students’ voices be heard,” Brown said.
At the CUNY schools, students completed questionnaires about their level of campus involvement, and the majority said they were uninvolved or minimally involved in campus activities.
The council of advocacy and leadership meeting was comprised of Brown, seven student government presidents and the Student-Wide Judiciary chief justice, Joe Wolf.
Council members worried that the effort to give students more control over their own money would result in higher fees.
“We have already seen increasing student fees over the past few years and we don’t want this to serve as another reason for administrators to create another student fee,” said Tanja Aho, president of the Graduate Student Association.
Maria Coluccio, a representative from the medical school, said she agreed with Aho and also expressed concern that the process could inaccurately group medical and graduate students with undergraduates.
“Obviously lots of things aren’t applicable to graduate and medical students at UB and the priorities of these students are going to be different from those of [21,020]
undergraduate students,” Coluccio said. “We would like to see a recommendation to correct data confusion between medical students and graduate students.”
Coluccio also advocated for creating a resolution to ensure that a portion of the participatory budgeting funds would be applied toward graduate and medical student interests. Coluccio echoed recent concerns from graduate and medical students that they often do not see the same benefits as undergraduates through student fee allocation.
Gunnar Haberl, the incoming Student Association president, said he would be interested in receiving feedback from the CUNY schools that have implemented the new budgeting process.
He also said he would like to do some “independent reading” on the subject to see how participatory budgeting could be realistically implemented at UB without raising student fees.
Changes to UB’s smoke-free policy
The council also reviewed a Faculty Senate report about the practical enforcement of campus smoking restrictions.
UB first enacted its no-smoking policy in December of 2009, but members of the university continue to grapple with the unruly problem of implementation. Members of the United University Professions, the union that represents UB’s faculty and staff, argue that the right to smoke on campus is an issue that must go through collective bargaining for there to be any further movement.
The latest Faculty Senate proposal recommended $50 fines or one to two hours of community service for students caught smoking or vaping within 100 feet of designated campus buffer zones.
The policy aims to engage with student smokers by ramping up Wellness Education Services and directing smokers to the appropriate on campus resources and counseling and smoking cessation programs through a process of referrals, according to Brown.
Haberl said he agreed with the report’s general recommendations to implement a new, forceable smoke-free policy, but that he wanted to see a greater commitment to concrete policy recommendations and a more detailed plan as to how those policy proposals could be achieved.
Haberl served as proxy for current SA president, Leslie Veloz, who could not attend the meeting.
Brown conceded that the policy statement is “really just a skeleton” to be developed with UB officials, and asked the group to endorse the Faculty Senate proposal.
Aho recommended any endorsement require that the final policy include input from student government officials to find ways to practically implement the policy.
The council voted unanimously to endorse the smoking proposal and will revisit the budgetary proposal at its next meeting in June.
Elizabeth Napolitano is a staff writer and can be reached at news@ubspectrum.com
Elizabeth "Liz" Napolitano is the senior news editor for The Spectrum. She's an optimistic pessimist who found her love for journalism in Ecuador. She likes late night walks and reading Twitter threads in their entirety.
