Last spring, confronted by massive new spending and segregated fee increases, the student body elected a more conservative Associated Students of Madison. They wanted something different, and so far have not been let down. This year's Student's Services Finance Committee has started off by denying eligibility altogether to certain previously funded groups, citing no discernible service provided to the student body for the public dollar. Among others, the InfoShop and the Labor Center have been cut off entirely, and it's not irrational to say that organizations such as the Multicultural Student's Coalition, which received massive increases last year, will be decreased by a significant margin. The InfoShop should serve as a great example of why there has been such a backlash, and that these budget cuts are not only valid, but may serve to spur a renewed sense of purpose for the membership.
Paying a visit to the InfoShop, one sees a great amount of material for radical leftist causes, and that's even before walking through the door. The windows have been covered in posters advertising one cause or another, and that's only a hint of what is inside. A couple problems soon become apparent, though. According to Sarah Dibbert, a paid staffer at the InfoShop, there is no way to quantify exactly how many people come in on a given day, how much material is provided to students and what sort of result they produce. As such, ASM has until now been continually providing about $20,000 annually for a service that can show no benefit or clear result to the greater campus community that has been subsidizing them for all these years. All that can be shown is that the people already involved in these various causes make use of the InfoShop quite frequently on our dime.
Going beyond the questions of clerical accountability, one should examine the root of the problem, whether any real service worth public funding has been provided to students at all. What exactly does the InfoShop do? They provide information through their shop, tabling, and other events for what Dibbert calls \the alternative side of an issue,"" or left-wing ideology. Jonathan Mertzig, another InfoShop staffer, replied when asked what valued service is provided, ""We're from a general left-wing activist perspective and we provide materials that hopefully fill the gap in perspective in terms of what's provided on campus."" And here is our problem.
After the Southworth case, which established viewpoint neutrality in the allocating of segregated fees, ASM decided to only subsidize services, not ideological pursuits, and then defined the dissemination of certain viewpoints to be services to students. Whereas activist groups used to have to organize themselves, gather resources and recruit people, now they can simply get money from the seg-fee pool and then pursue their goal. When I asked the staff at the Infoshop about their paid positions, totaling $10,676 in the current operating budget, they were proud of the ""living wage"" paid for their staffers' time. It's easy to pay a high wage when one is not responsible for making the money used for payment, and it's easy to admire the activism of our campus when it is in fact a forced outcome from the public treasury.
The InfoShop and other activist groups should view lost eligibility as both a crisis and an opportunity, or as Homer Simpson put it, a ""crisitunity."" If they can get 400 Madison residents to contribute $50 for the cause, they'll again have $20,000. If not, they may have to take a pay cut, but personal sacrifice is an integral part of grassroots activism. The limited generosity of the donors will serve as incentive to efficiency and demonstration of real results, much like stockholders in a company. At any rate, their brand of activism cannot be conducted in an organic fashion when they protest against government policies while being funded almost entirely by the government and dependent on the public for operation. Let ASM get out of the business of arranging for activist causes to operate, and return to true good old-fashioned grassroots democracy.
