Its limited budget could be reallocated to better serve the student body.
The University of Tulsa has a special relationship with its student government. At most colleges, student councils are either niche organizations with marginal influence or veritable bureaucratic colossi. The Student Government Association here at TU is both of these and neither of them; it is a contradiction, a flywheel driven by its own inertia that no longer powers anything. SGA is both the talk of the town and a forgotten institution; it is a constant source of drama, and yet its meetings are generally uneventful and its members mostly cordial. Most of SGA’s proceedings concern other student organizations, but the student government is deeply unpopular with club presidents. Perhaps the one thing SGA does consistently is confound itself.
Why is the most important student organization’s only responsibility to dole out the university’s money? Why does this task demand hours of effort from dozens of people? The only logical answer is this: SGA is a thinly veiled money making venture which perpetuates itself with infuriating regulations designed to distract its opponents.
When faced with extensive budget cuts last semester, the student body’s senators made the difficult decision to eliminate their own salaries — right after they lowered club funding. They then cut the student org budget again, bringing it to a mere eight dollars per person per year with a maximum of $400. Want to throw a pizza party for your 50-person club? Spend a quarter of your budget, and nobody has to share a slice! And if your book club’s eight members want to go out for coffee on school money, go right ahead, so long as you do it exactly once! You might even have enough left over to tip your barista.
What is infuriating about this system is that many clubs do not spend the little money they receive, soaking up valuable funds that more active organizations sorely need. College students should not have to solicit donations to pursue their interests if they are part of a chartered organization. Despite this, SGA’s bureaucracy does not account for the frequency of a club’s meetings when allocating money from its limited budget. Additionally, SGA charters nearly every new student organization, no matter how tenuous the justification. From my time as a senator last semester, I cannot recall a single club being denied a charter. Who needs a hundred pages of rules and regulations if that is the norm?
The reason SGA is so opaque and its funding system so obtuse is to distract from its real mission — to serve as a stipend for its executives. Executive salaries went unchanged during the recent budget cuts, despite being far higher than what senators made. Combined, the fourteen individuals in upper leadership who receive compensation from SGA make $8,280 a year. Some say these salaries are justified based on the time commitment required to be in upper leadership, which is on par with other campus jobs. That argument does not hold water, though, because student government does not need to be a job.
At the most basic level, SGA is two things: a budget office for student organizations and a hobbyist group for government enthusiasts. Both of these missions can be accomplished easily, and yet SGA chooses to make them difficult with innumerable rules, regulations and restrictions. It is difficult to undo that choice because that is the way it has always been. Now that senators do not get paid, the only people who benefit from the SGA flywheel anymore are the student body’s executives, whose needlessly taxing jobs earn them thousands of dollars each. And yet, no group seems poised to transform SGA anytime soon: senators are stuck in their own bureaucracy, the executives are perfectly happy to get paid and regular students do not care enough to organize a referendum, which is something any person in the student body can do, by the way. It seems, then, that clubs will continue to go underfunded and that SGA will remain out of touch with students. The incoming executive team is not inheriting a coherent government system so much as a thought experiment gone awry.
