When In Doubt, Create Another Committee
Nicholas Wilbur’s latest report on this new-fangled RRC thing:
[RRC Chair David] Gowards memo stated that RRC does not decide which programs are worthy of funding; it only decides whether a program is worthy of ASUO recognition.
Programs that arent recognized cant receive funding.
I’m glad we got that cleared up: the RRC won’t decide which programs are worthy of funding, it’ll just decide which programs can receive funding. I don’t know about you all, but I feel much better now.
As Ian pointed out below, this quote is significant:
The only instance that a program might not qualify for continuation of recognition is if its Mission and Goals statements have drastically changed since the previous year.
On its face, this seems airtight; but if that’s the whole story, it seems to make the RRC little more than a rubber stamp with a budget attached, given that most groups’ mission and goals statements don’t change drastically from year to year. In effect, though…
Goward said that in 98.9 percent of cases, programs lose recognition after somebody files a grievance a formal complaint with the ASUO Executive or the Constitution Court.
Aha. And that shouldn’t be too difficult to arrange, right? The RRC looks, to me, like an end-around designed to avoid the circus that ensued last year when PFC started making value judgments about groups’ mission statements, by ensuring that disfavored groups never even make it in front of PFC. If that is its purpose, I don’t think it’s a good idea. If that’s not its purpose, I’d be interested to hear other suggestions.
(And the potential impact upon this particular student group? Well, as last year demonstrated, an angry grievance-filing mob can be drummed up at relatively short notice on virtually any pretext. What I’m curious about is the legal distinction, or lack thereof, between PFC and a manufactured gatekeeper committee. My instinct is that the RRC, as a branch of student government, would be every bit as bound by Southworth as PFC is – but I may well be missing some of the nuances here.)
Back when the PFC wasn’t violating the U.S. Constitution, it pretty much approached the mission-and-goals meetings as a rubber stamp, too. If memory serves, those meetings pretty much consisted of the late Bruce Miller trying to convince Joy Nair that the Hawaii club should be defunded because it hadn’t educated any students on the actual geographical location of Hawaii (true story).
“We don’t decide funding, but we do decide if you’re allowed to ask for funding.”
Right.
Because Petkun made this thing up, I believe that the intentions behind it are good, but as usual his ideas seem to fall a little short in practice.
I wonder how Goward was able to pin it down to 98.9%.
The double-talk Goward offers to suggest that the RRC does not make funding decisions is completely unconvincing. If this process is used to weasel out of Southworth, the weaseling won’t get far — a denial of access to the funding process is functionally identical to a denial of funding. Duh. Southworth binds the whole process; adding a step to that process changes nothing.