The ASUO Senate Meeting of Dec. 3, 2008

It could turn out that the crucial question of Wednesday’s thunderous ASUO Senate meeting is not one of principle, or ethics, or ideology, but one of grade school mathematics. Namely: What is two-thirds of 20?

Two-thirds is the magic number required for quorum at Senate meetings. If fewer than two thirds of senators show up, the meeting can’t go ahead. In case you don’t have a calculator on hand, two mathematical thirds of 20 is 13.33… The number of senators at this week’s meeting was 13, with the opportunities and obstacles of dead week taking their toll on the body. If someone decides to challenge the claims of Senators Alex McCafferty (Seat 7, ACFC) and Emma Kallaway (Seat 5, EMU Board) that the established practice is to round to the nearest whole number, the swells of tense sweat upon which this meeting was tossed may have been in vain.

For “someone” in the last sentence, you may read “Sam Dotters-Katz.” It was the ASUO President’s request that $56,000 (roughly) of a $76,000 (roughly) windfall the ASUO is set to receive from the University be put under his de jure control that caused the controversy.

To Dotters-Katz, there were only two certain options: the alternatives given to him by the administration. One is moving the money to funds he controls. The other is effectively losing it for the purposes of funding programs by putting it in the over-realized fund, as was originally intended when the University first made the money by selling a tax credit it had received for reducing carbon emissions two years ago. Basically, the over-realized fund is already set to be redistributed to students, so it’s completely off-limits until Spring term. Dotters-Katz promised the Senate, however, that he would require its approval every time he spent the money and sign off on any recommendation they made for him to spend it.

To many in the Senate, the choice was not so simple. Senator Hailey Sheldon (Seat 10, DFC) was especially vehement in maintaining that another option that would put the money in the hands of the Senate could be arranged. Mike Eyster, representing the University encouraged her in that belief.

The brawling on this issue was unexpected, considering that this meeting had been called despite the fact that the Senate met during dead week specifically to discuss another issue: an hours extension for the 79x bus. But that issue didn’t require much discussion. Every Senator supported spending $20,000 of the carbon credit money to help the administration finance what is seen as a vital initiative. It was the unexpected issue of what to do with the rest that created all the rancor.

More accurately, the rancor has been there since Dotters-Katz modified the Clark Document to distribute the over-realized fund back to students. Since then, senators have bristled whenever he has come to them asking for money, pointing out to him that there isn’t as much of it now that they don’t have the over-realized fund, which was meant to finance one-time requests for extraordinary circumstances. The epithet “lining the executive’s pockets” was even dropped in a recent meeting. In this newfound atmosphere of mistrust, Dotters-Katz was never likely to convince the Senate to give him such a large amount of money on the strength of nothing more than a promise.

Just as the Senate feels it has reason to mistrust Dotters-Katz, he equally feels he has the right to be frustrated with the Senate. Every time he asks for money, he says, it is to fund something to benefit students. Whenever his motives are questioned in Senate meetings, he heaves a helpless sigh.

The tension between senators’ mistrust and Dotters-Katz’s frustration is now threatening to spill over into a battle on the legitimacy of an entire Senate meeting in which an important decision was made on an issue Dotters-Katz has repeatedly described as “the most important of my presidency.” One must also wonder what effect this will have on the Black Student Union, whom the Senate granted $1,500 in surplus funds needed for its Kwanzaa celebration at this meeting.

In case you were wondering, the following senators were missing from the meeting: Kate Jones (Seat 9, DFC), who opted out to study; Sandy Weintraub (Seat 18, Graduate & Law), who was flying back from a wedding on Long Island, N.Y.; Nick Schultz (Seat 2, PFC), who other senators said had a cold; Jordan Schenck (Seat 3, PFC); Tina Snodgrass (Seat 8, ACFC); Lidiana Soto (Seat 14, Social Sciences); and Suzie Giacomelli (Seat 19, journalism). I will attempt to contact the senators I haven’t spoken to so I can ask them why they didn’t go, but I believe all had legitimate reasons. It’s dead week. We’re all finding time hard to come by.

I will post an update on the denouement of the dispute over where the carbon credit money will go soon.