Recently, leaders in the Associated Students of Madison committed a series of questionable actions that are cause for concern over transparency in student government. A few weeks ago the registered student organization Associated Free Thinkers Ensuring Responsibility (AFTER) placed a full-page ad in The Badger Herald urging students to vote against the United Council referendum.
The ad immediately sparked a suit from former ASM members who claimed using student segregated fees for election purposes violated a number of ASM bylaws and UW System election policy. In response, AFTER pulled two additional ads from The Badger Herald it planned to run later that week. While segregated fees arguably are used for political purposes all the time, this suit is particularly interesting because the named defendants are all either ASM committee chairs or members of the uppermost echelons of ASM leadership.
At the Student Judiciary hearing Sunday, members of the AFTER RSO said the group was a) never a political party and should be allowed to advocate for issues they care about and b) intended to use private funds rather than segregated fees to pay for the ad.
Though the defendants may get by on such a loophole, the suit is only the tip of a much larger and deeper iceberg than anyone outside the ASM ""good-old-boys"" club would suspect.
According to an interview last week with ASM Chair Brandon Williams—a named defendant who was not present at the hearing—AFTER began as an underground slate last spring composed of a number of notable long-standing ASM members including Williams, current ASM Chief of Staff Tom Templeton, University Affairs Chair Carl Fergus and Finance Committee Chair Matt Beemsterboer among others. When I interviewed Williams, he said there were ""quite a few people"" who coordinated their elections but never came out publicly as an opposition slate to last spring's MPOWER slate. He said former SSFC Chair Kurt Gosselin, one of only three named members of the AFTER RSO, helped organize a number of the member's campaigns.
Williams was careful to differentiate between the AFTER slate and the AFTER RSO. He said after he was elected to student council last spring he was not interested in running for ASM chair as part of an official and potentially divisive slate. However, shortly before the election three members of the AFTER slate including Beemsterboer, Fergus and Gosselin, decided to apply for an operations grant for a group they called ""AFTER,"" essentially formalizing and making public a group that had existed informally for months.
Williams said his understanding at the time was that the AFTER RSO funds would be used to advocate for issues AFTER cared about if members of the slate were not elected to leadership roles within ASM. Despite the RSO's originally stated goals of hosting focus groups, speakers and discussion panels, the $4,056 they received in reality was only ever intended to be used as funds for their first goal: issue campaigning.
In an e-mail sent from Beemsterboer to Max Love, a petitioner in the suit and a former member of Student Council, Beemsterboer said the AFTER RSO had no ""regularly scheduled meetings"" and the ""only meeting this year was one that lasted all of 15 minutes."" Additionally, none of AFTER's funds were to be spent until the ad in The Badger Herald was placed, no speakers were ever brought to campus, no discussion panels were ever organized and no official membership lists were kept.
Although students should be encouraged to form organizations and advocate for issues they care about, the underhanded tactics of the three named AFTER RSO members are appalling. Beemsterboer is the chair of the finance committee, which approves allocating operations grants for RSOs including groups like AFTER. His leadership role on the committee should have meant he had comprehensive knowledge of the ways student organizations are and are not allowed to use operations grants. Though many members of the AFTER slate had no involvement in obtaining the funds the AFTER RSO received, the way the named members of the RSO used their power to secure funds and their intention to use the money in violation of their own ASM bylaws is a testament to the potential for corruption in ASM.
This type of power play is not new to student governments in UW System schools. In fact, the existence of the AFTER slate and AFTER RSO looks eerily similar to an election scandal at UW-Milwaukee that happened just a few years ago. During the 2007 student government elections at UW-Milwaukee, it seemed as if years of corruption within the Student Association came to a head when a number of students were exposed for plotting to beat the system by forming student organizations, applying for segregated fee funding and then using those funds to help re-elect members who were also part of student government. One of the student organizations, the Students United for Change (SUFC), included a number of members of student government who were in charge of allocating the funds for student organizations such as SUFC.
The rampant corruption in UW-Milwaukee's Student Association and the most recent actions of the AFTER RSO members reveals the lack of transparency and accountability expected of RSOs and elected student officials. Any number of the 700 RSOs at UW-Madison could potentially use the same schemes as the AFTER gang and never get caught. It's despicable that members of ASM leadership—individuals who are elected to preserve the student voice on campus—would knowingly violate ASM bylaws by using segregated fees to prop up their own personal political viewpoints.
Hannah Furfaro is a senior majoring in journalism and political science. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
