TO THE EDITOR:
UNC College Republicans is proud to announce a new ballot initiative for the upcoming elections: to finally give students a vote on the ASG. Since the UNC Association of Student Governments (ASG) was founded in 1972, the UNC-CH student body has had zero say in our membership; nor did we have a say when a fee was levied on students to pay for its operations.
As The Daily Tar Heel and Carolina Review reported last year, very little of ASG’s budget actually goes to benefitting you and I. About 41 percent of its budget goes to paying officers’ salaries while 50 percent goes to administrative costs, travel and hotel expenses — what we call “overhead.” The only justification ASG officers give for their extravagance is that it improves the organization overall. But if the organization serves no one outside its own officers, who cares?
Besides the 8 percent of the budget that actually goes to benefit students, ASG brings little tangible benefit to our campus — our money really goes to pay for all-expenses-paid meetings each month. The majority of the student body may agree with such an arrangement, but we’ll never know because any attempt to ratify our participation in ASG has been stopped by members of student government who are tied to its existence.
For more information, check us out at uncgop.com or ask any CR with a petition — and, if you want, sign it. With your help, we can end this anti-democratic arrangement once and for all.
Anthony Dent
Chairman, UNC College Republicans
