The Journal

Issue date: 11/17/05 Section: Opinion/Editorial

Trevor Zickgraf

Once I found out about the budget cuts, a lot of different emotions rolled through me. Initially I was shocked. One-hundred and ninety six thousand dollars?!?!? That was from student affairs alone.

The next emotion was sadness. I'm a program manager for campus activities in addition to my student government duties and I was informed that I wouldn't be allowed to return to that job at the beginning of next semester because of the $15,000 that's supposed to be cut from the University Center's student employment budget.

After the initial shock came the anger and frustration. When Dean of Students Ted Hoef told the Student Government Association (SGA) that an unexpected drop in enrollment, particularly at Webster's military campuses, was one of the primary reasons for all of these cuts, I just didn't get it. How was this unexpected? Isn't the U.S. military currently occupying another country?

Right now SGA is collecting surveys to see whether or not students would support a student activity fee. Initially, my thought process was that it was hard to continue to help out a school that seemingly turned its back on you. The problem with this round of budget cuts is that they seem to affect the students who care about this university the most, the student employees and other student leaders.

As seen through the chalkings and fliers around campus, this round of budget cuts, unlike last year's, aren't going on without notice. It's easy to be angry and it's easy to be frustrated. But we should be angry and we should be frustrated and we shouldn't let the university think that cuts like this can be made without explanation. We also have to be hopeful. The lines of communication between different student organizations have been fractured for a long time. There has never been a more important time to fix those lines of communication than now.

With these cuts, students can no longer rely on the multi-cultural center and campus activities for the big expensive programming like Springfest and International Week. Student organizations are the only student groups not affected by these budget cuts. There are things like the programming pool fund, which SGA set aside last year to help pay for bigger and better programming on campus, available for student collaboration.

These budget cuts crippled student life on campus, but only temporarily as long as student organizations start communicating with each other. SGA, campus activities and Multicultural Center and International Student Affairs (MCISA) are still there to be facilitators of this much needed communication; they just don't have the money for programming.

Student organizations rarely use up all of their requested budgets, but next semester is the time for groups to get together and start planning the big events they didn't think were possible before. The resources are there on the SGA's side, now we're just waiting for organizations to use things like the programming pool fund.

I don't want anyone to think that the administration is trying to get off lightly with this challenge, but we can't just sit here and play the blame game. That game is already being played and we'll continue to play it until we get some answers. As a student body, we need to be able to stand up and tell the administration that we won't just sit back and let these cuts happen, but we also have to find our own solutions now that they have.





Trevor Zickgraf, the president of the SGA, is a contributing writer for The Journal.

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