OPINION: Student Fee Committee Must Not Meet Over Summer

(The Student Fee Advisory Committee at UT-Tyler on April 28, 2023. Source: James Hescock)

At the beginning of the semester, VP Ona Tolliver, an ex-offico member of The Student Fee Advisory Committee (aka, SFAC, a committee that oversees money from student fees) told the committee that an administrator told the student services departments to request only a “flat budget” for the coming year. (This term, a “flat budget”, means a budget that is “flat” with, or contains no new spending increases from the previous year.) As a result of this instruction, the advisory committee received no real requests for greater annual funding from student service departments and it chose not to approve any either in the belief that to do so without telling all service departments about the opportunity would be unfair to all departments. 

However, nearly halfway through the committee’s string of semester meetings, the committee discovered that fee account has over $700,000 dollars of student fee money in reserve from the past four or five years. The Chief Financial Officer’s recommendation was to spenddown this account in one-time requests for this year.

However, by this time, the committee had basically run out of time. For three of its student committee members were about to graduate and so was the student body president who appointed them. The committee did not have time to go back to the requesting service departments and tell them to present a new request for one-time appropriations before the student members graduated. 

However, VP Tolliver’s suggestion and the committee’s decision was, rather than wait until the beginning of next year and defer to next year’s committee to approve requests, instead the committee would meet over the summer to grant one-time requests to requesting departments. The committee would do this even though at least three of its student members will have graduated by then and as would have the student body president, and it planned to have the new student body president for next year appoint new members to this year’s committee.

However, the committee’s term is over. It should not meet over the summer. Instead, it should defer its spenddown activity to next year’s committee which should meet as soon as possible in the fall to grant one-time appropriations. Anything short of this deprives the student constituency of its proper representation in the 2022-2023 academic year through its elected student body president. The only person who can appoint new student members is the previous student body president who graduated.  

Consider: the student body voted in Spring 2021 to elect Landry Smith as Student Body President. This president appointed five students to serve on SFAC. Now, both this elected president and three of his appointees have ended their relationship to the university and graduated. Therefore, the committee cannot continue its business without these student members. Therefore, the 2022-2023 SFAC’s term is over. Student services appropriation activity is now the business of next year’s SFAC. 

Yet, what if Chloe Dix, the newly elected Student Body President, appoints three new student members instead? Then it is unauthorized, because the power to make appointments for the 2022-2023 academic year lies with Landry Smith. He won the Spring 2021 Student Election and only he has the power to appoint student members to the 2022-2023 committee.

Since Dix was not elected to effect the current academic year, then she does not have the power to make appointments for the current year. The current committee’s term is over since it cannot receive new appointments through President Dix. 

So with the necessary student members, the committee’s term is over. It business now lies with next year’s SFAC. The administration must now accept responsibility its interference with the committee’s business with its “flat budget” request at first of the year. The 2022-2023 SFAC never recovered from this interference. It did not know to use the available time it had to establish a one-time request process while student members were still available.

Anyone else then who tries to appoint new student committee members in order to for SFAC to do business over the summer effectively contests the Spring 2021 student election. They reject Landry Smith as the students’ only authorized representative to make student appointments to SFAC in the 2022-2023 academic year.

For this reason, SFAC should not meet over the summer but defer appropriation requests to next year’s SFAC. 

Twitter: @jhescock12

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