I am outraged, but not surprised, by the fact that the Student Association executive board has voted to have their tuition bills paid by the students of UB. If this action was coming from anyone else but the same officers who appropriated approximately $7,000 in student funds toward lavish "staff-building" trips to Cedar Point and Toronto in the summer of 2001, I might be slightly shocked.
According to Wednesday's article, SA President Christian Oliver gives two reasons for this salary increase. First, he claims that it is to ensure the financial security of students who hold these positions in the future. If this was completely true, then why do the officers insist on being compensated retroactively for the tuition they paid last semester? Evidently, their motives are not as pristine as they've chosen to present them.
Oliver's second main reason for the stipend increase was to bring the Student Association at UB in line with other schools around the nation. Ideally, UB should be compared with schools that are relatively of the same size and receive similar funding. I'm unsure as to how SUNY Brockport obtains the funds to remunerate their SA executives, but the school is definitely not comparable in size, having an undergraduate population of less than half of UB's. However, Binghamton, like UB, is one of the four SUNY centers and is closer in size. Yet members of their executive board, according to (Binghamton) SA President Becky Patt, make only $3,500 a year while putting in around 45 hours each week. UB's executive board claims to work a similar number of hours each week, and yet they believe that they deserve over three times that amount in compensation.
It might interest the student body to know that UB's SA executives gave themselves raises despite the fact that an independent auditing firm found multiple faults and inconsistencies in the methods SA has employed in spending and documenting the usage of student funds. Do the students of UB deserve representatives who mismanage the money they've entrusted them with? Do they deserve representatives who favor raising their mandatory fees only to put the extra money into their own pockets? Why do SA executives deserve free tuition when others, who do not benefit from such generous stipends, must take out loans to finance their education? The mandatory student activity fee, from which the SA officers are withdrawing the funds to increase their salaries, helps to support an emergency fund that is meant to assist students who need help paying for school. By taking this money for themselves, these SA executives are hindering this assistance, thereby limiting the educational opportunities of students in need in order to satisfy their own self-interests.
If Oliver's comments about the need to make the SA positions more lucrative represent the feelings of the entire executive board, then perhaps we, as a student body, should be interested in lowering the salaries of these so-called student representatives. After all, if we are attracting the kinds of candidates who won't think twice about dipping heavily into student funds to satisfy their own fiscal interests, then perhaps the positions are already too lucrative, and we need to consider lowering the stipend to attract better candidates who truly care to represent the interests of UB students.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
