Second chances are hard to come by. But the Committee for the Review of Student Fees is getting one. Those $165 in new student fees? Gone, after a simple meeting of university President Dan Mote’s cabinet. Why? Vice President for Administrative Affairs Ann Wylie said she and Student Government Association President Steve Glickman had a misunderstanding, and the final 90 minutes of the meeting, which he missed, will be redone. This saves Glickman from a colossal blunder and gives students a new chance to defeat these unfair fees. The new meeting hasn’t been scheduled yet, but if the administration doesn’t want the fee review process to become even more of a farce, here are some steps they should take.
OPEN IT UP
The new meeting should be held in the open, and administrators asking for fee increases should be forced to publicly explain their reasoning. Keeping the meetings closed is legal under state law, but mere legality shouldn’t be enough to preserve an opaque, undemocratic process.
The students on the committee — including Glickman and Graduate Student Government President Anu Kothari — should do anything they can to force the meeting into the daylight.
If the meetings continue to be held in closed session, members of the General Assembly should force the meeting out of the shadows by changing the law.
HIRE A TOWN CRIER
The university has done a great job in the past of publicizing forums on subjects like textbook prices and binge drinking, and administrators made a campus-wide announcement about the budget town hall earlier this week. Similar efforts should be made to keep the student body informed about the fee review process.
The Open Meetings Act requires governmental bodies to give notice of their meetings, either by publishing a notice in the Maryland Register, by actively telling members of the news media who regularly cover the process or by posting a notice in a convenient public location. There is no notice in the register, the administration never informed The Diamondback editorial staff, and if they posted a notice, it wasn’t easy to find. The lack of publicity is not just unfair — it may be illegal.
KEEP NOTES
You may have noticed what actually happened at the committee meeting last Thursday isn’t entirely clear. There’s a reason for this: No independent observer can watch the meeting, and no minutes of the meeting were available.
So to re-piece the events, one must rely on the memories of the participants, which, for reasons of either bias or fallibility, are unreliable. SGA Senior Vice President Elliott Morris told The Diamondback that English professor Maynard Mack abstained on one vote, which Mack later denied. It’s unlikely Morris intentionally lied, but students shouldn’t have to rely on committee members’ recollections.
Nothing in state law requires minutes be made immediately available, but at the very least, records of who voted which way should be disclosed so constituents can hold their representatives accountable.
In the short term, some members of the committee should take it upon themselves to keep detailed and accurate notes, particularly if the meeting happens behind closed doors.
BEAT THE FEES
Lastly, the committee should reverse its earlier, now irrelevant decision on $165 in new fees. While the amount isn’t tremendously significant, tuition and state-supplemented funds traditionally support what the fee increases will pay for — the University Health Center, the libraries and classroom maintenance. There is no reason this should change.
If the line between state-supported and fee-supported activities is blurred, what’s to prevent the administration from creating a $100 fee to fund professors’ salaries down the road? Provost Nariman Farvardin said earlier this week in an e-mail that administrators don’t plan on expanding fees this way, but it’s still a disturbing precedent.
Between the controversial new fees and Glickman’s early departure, the student fee review process is now under more scrutiny than ever. Let’s hope that’s enough to cause some much-needed reforms.
