The Daily Tar Heel
URL: http://www.dailytarheel.com/index.php/article/2012/02/vote_yes_on_asg_referendum
Current Date: Thu, 24 May 2012 12:44:59 -0400
Vote 'Yes' on ASG referendum
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Regardless of how you feel about UNC’s role in the Association of Student Governments, today’s referendum should not be passed.
If you think UNC should pull out of ASG, the referendum won’t get you any closer to this goal; it would deprive UNC of participation in ASG meetings, but it wouldn’t guarantee that UNC students don’t have to pay the ASG fee.
Instead, UNC’s student government should work within the organization to reform it and improve its effectiveness, rather than abandoning it altogether. As yet, those in favor of the referendum have not proposed a better alternative.
To be sure, there is a discussion to be had about ASG, its role in the tuition talks and how relevant it really is to UNC.
But passing a referendum for UNC to withdraw from the organization right now will be a slap in the face to ASG’s other members and will make it difficult to proceed with current efforts to reform the association from within. Such a vote would be illogical at best.
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8 comments
I’m sure ASG reforms are right around the corner!
http://www.moreyouknow.org/
As amused as I was about Nash and narwhals, I’m more amused by the “Facts” at the moreyouknow.org site. The total cited as ASG’s advocacy budget is for two specific events — and judging by the regular DTH coverage of the group, ASG clearly does advocacy work more than just over the summer and during “Students Day at the Capitol”. Yet the funding for those advocacy activities over the other 11 months of the year are conveniently ignored to come up with the “fact” total.
Nothing like cherry-picking data and deceiving the students to win at any cost. You’ll make fine lawyers.
The advocacy figure comes from the part of ASG’s budget labeled advocacy. While ASG clearly should do advocacy work over the other 11 months of the year, they usually don’t. They spend a lot of time having really important meetings amongst themselves, but that’s not advocacy, it’s bureaucracy. And we can see how effective their meager “advocacy” has been. Enjoy your 13.5% tuition bump next year.
So what you’re saying is that Student Congress should be disbanded?
Because instead of advocating against a “13.5% tuition bump” of $950 , de la Rosa and his colleagues have wasted untold hours of their time (and our SG fee) focusing on $1 instead.
Start the petition to disband Congress, I’ll happily be the first signature.
Student Congress doesn’t claim the mantle of being an advocacy organization for 220,000 students.
And if the Speaker and his compatriots want to spend their own (uncompensated) time on things like this, that’s their prerogative. Worst comes to worst, you can always vote them out of office.
And the total cost of the No Campaign to Student Government is $0. It’s also worth nothing that referendum campaigns cannot receive SG reimbursement for their campaign expenditures.
It’s also worth noting your argument is not an argument for ASG.
If I were interested in campaigning for ASG, I’d do so. I’m less concerned about that organization than I am members of our Student Government misrepresenting facts to win a referendum. It highlights why Congress is a joke filled with resume-padders — it doesn’t “claim the mantle of being an advocacy organization”, just a group of people who like to hear themselves talk and get quoted by the DTH.
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