A quantitative and qualitative review of "Enough is enough, ASG" in the UNCCH Daily Tar Heel
T Greg's Tomes: A quantitative and qualitative review of "Enough is enough, ASG" in the UNCCH Daily Tar Heel
I knew ahead of time that an editorial would be coming out in the Daily Tar Heel of UNC Chapel Hill regarding UNCASG and its budget. I wrote columns for the NC State Technician for 2 years, and if one thing is true across all college newspapers it's that coming up with editorials daily is always a struggle. So when phone calls get made by a reporter for a news piece, you can almost guarantee that if the news story is salacious enough the Opinion/Editorial section of the paper will write something on it just so they have content to put in print.
When the editorial ran today I had no intention of responding in writing to the DTH itself, and I still don't. The column had multiple quantitative errors that could have easily been corrected with a 2-minute phone call to me, and the qualitative conclusions it made ran completely counter to editorials the Editorial Board penned even a few months ago.
Columnists have to make an effort to twist facts that much, and that typically translates into having no interest at all whatsoever in any honest dialogue. That goes double when an editorial cites remarks by you, personally by name, but leaves out the context of your commentary (we'll get to that in Section IX).
For a real-world example of this phenomenon, compare my original letter to the editor 2 years ago regarding the M Cole Jones trial (before I had ever considered any significant role in UNCASG and was perfectly content being a 1-term Student Senate President) with what was actually published after "editing": <http://www.phoenixwebinc.n
While I still have no intent of writing a letter to the editor or a guest column or anything of that nature to the Daily Tar Heel, the simple truth is I know a lot of people at the paper and at UNC Chapel Hill who I consider very good friends. And many of them are expecting an analysis from me in some form, even if it's not designed for publication in the DTH.
Hence this note.
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I. DISCLAIMER #1: THE NEWS DEPARTMENT IS EXEMPT
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Before I get started, I want to stipulate at the outset that I have no issue at all whatsoever with the DTH News Department. The coverage of UNCASG by Olivia Bowler, Matt Lynley, Eric Johnson and others has, in my opinion, always been fair.
There have been times where we've disagreed, and yes occasionally there have been factual errors that needed correcting. But in all those instances the reporting was done in good faith. If you've got a reporter who does that on a regular basis, you can't ask for anything better.
So far as I'm aware, I have never complained in any forum about the quality of the news reports relating to UNCASG -- and I haven't been given a reason to start. The news reporters are not responsible for the headlines to their stories (typically done by section editors or copy editors), and they have no role in the editorial process (that's a wholly different operation).
In other words, if you've ever seen me gripe about the DTH's coverage in any capacity, now or in the future, mentally exclude the news reporters from the list of people I'm complaining about.
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II. DISCLAIMER #2: I HAVE A PRETTY GOOD MEMORY… AND EMAIL
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I started at NC State in 1998, long before the $1/student ASG fee ever existed (yes that was a long time ago, but my first years at NCSU also included several of the most traumatic experiences in my life so I remember them pretty well).
For example, I remember attending ASG meetings for NCSU. I remember getting chewed out at one such meeting when I made the mistake of saying I'd support UNCCH in the NCAA playoffs after NCSU had been eliminated. I remember our Student Body President Jenny Chang getting pulled over on the highway to UNCC because she was going 100+ mph in a car that was rattling so bad Teresa and I thought i would fall apart (she somehow talked her way out of a ticket too!). I remember who Nick Marisis was and why he resigned as ASG President. And so on.
Not only do I remember UNCASG back in the 1998-2000 era when I was in it, I remember it during the 2001-2005 era when I was a college dropout because most objective people classify this time span as UNCASG's "heyday". So even though I wasn't a student, I read the NCSU Technician and UNCCH Daily Tar Heel regularly. I remember, for example, writing a letter to the News & Observer complaining about the $1/student fee right after it was created (<http://www.phoenixwebinc.n
And not only do I remember UNCASG from 1998-2000 and 2000-2005, I also remember it from 2005 to the present. Why? I was a student at NC State by then and promptly resumed my position as an editorial columnist at the Technician before rejoining the Student Senate the following year. I remember the resignations, I remember the walkouts, I remember the controversies, and I was actually present in the room for most of them.
Oh and I have almost every single email I've ever sent or received going all the way back to 1999. With multiple archives of each.
Why am I laying this all out? Because every now and then I come across someone who has never been involved with UNCASG who tries to tell me what the group was like back at a given moment in time. Or I see someone who was in ASG at that time and tries to put an extra layer of shine on the past by convincing me of something that simply isn't true.
I've experienced enough of UNCASG across the past 11 years that I can decipher fact from bullshit. And if my memory ever fails, I can always just ask Teresa to confirm or deny my recollection of events… or pull up an email.
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III. DISCLAIMER #3: I DON'T CARE ENOUGH TO LIE OR SPIN
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In tandem with Disclaimer #2, since I know *I* have experienced enough of UNCASG to decipher fact from bullshit, I recognize that *other people* have experienced enough of UNCASG to decipher fact from bullshit as well. I'm actually Facebook friends with a good chunk of them, so they can see this note.
The simple truth is I'm not going to lie to you or slant the truth, because (1) I value my reputation for honesty more than almost anything else in life, (2) I couldn't get away with it even if I tried, and (3) I just don't care enough to make the effort.
Does that mean we're always going to come to the same conclusion from the same set of facts? Not at all. One advantage of being in this position at such a seasoned age is that I've got a different perspective on things compared to when I was an impetuous 17-year-old college freshman trying to remake the world in my image.
But like everything else we did last year in UNCASG, I'm going to give you the facts and I'm going to give you my unvarnished opinion based on those facts regardless if you agree or if your feelings get hurt. My résumé was already amazing long before I became UNCASG President, and it will still be amazing even if I end my presidency as an abject failure (if you need a visual reference, see <http://www.facebook.com/ph
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IV. BACKGROUND MATERIAL: DOCUMENTS
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In dissecting any editorial, it's necessary to have all of the objective facts first. Reasonable people can disagree on the conclusions drawn from those facts, but if those same people are arguing from two different sets of facts then they end up talking past each other.
Fortunately, this past year UNCASG has generated a boatload of documentation on its operations since the organization was so weak at recording things in the past.
Here are some key items you'll want to either print or review online before reading further:
1) Today's Daily Tar Heel editorial "Enough is enough, ASG"
<http://www.dailytarheel.co
2) Legislation adopted by UNCASG and applicable Executive Orders.
I'm listing the versions that were actually voted on by the delegates so we have line numbers to refer to; the final copies are called "engrossed" and look a bit fancier, but have the exact same content otherwise.
a. FB2, Fiscal Year 2010 Non-Recurring Budget Act (38th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
b. AR39, Adjournment Sine Die (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
c. FB33, Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Act (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
d. FB3, Fiscal Year 2009 Budget Act (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
e. R1, 2008-2009 M.A.P. Act (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
f. Executive Order 37-07, FY09 Travel Restrictions (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
3) Other background documents:
a. FB33 Legislative Report (37th Session) (this is a line-by-line comparison of every single change in the recurring budget from last year to this year)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
b. FB33 Student Fees by Campus by Fiscal Year (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
c. July 2008 Council of Student Body Presidents minutes (characterized by DTH reporter Eric Johnson at the time as "the best minutes I've seen from ASG in years")
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
d. September 2008 memo to Erskine Bowles and Hannah Gage (re
UNCASG's August 2008 meeting)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
e. October 2008 memo to Erskine Bowles and Hannah Gage (re UNCASG's September 2008 meeting)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
f. January 2009 memo to Erskine Bowles and Hannah Gage (re UNCASG's January 2009 meeting and tuition+fees)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
g. March 2009 quarterly report to the whole UNC Board of Governors (re November 2008 through February 2009 -- warning: this is a 4MB file that weighs in at 212 pages. It'll take awhile to download)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
h. June 2009 memo to Bruce Mallette re the Student Health Insurance initiative
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
4) The UNCASG Constitution
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
5) The Executive Officer Guide and Application (38th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
6) "The Clock is Ticking…" (the platform Ashley and I ran on)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
There are, quite literally, hundreds of pages worth of other documents generated by ASG that I could include in the reading list here, but for the sake of this particular note there's no real need. If you want to read any of them, please let me know and I'll send you a copy (most are already linked off of our Facebook group "UNCASG: Uniting Campuses, Serving Students").
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V. BACKGROUND MATERIAL: WHY DOES UNCASG EXIST?
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The overwhelming majority of the Association's history is poorly documented (if at all), an unfortunate habit among most student-based organizations particularly in the early part of their lifecycle. The Association's record-keeping was also more hindered than most groups because of its lack of a central location from its founding in 1972 until the $1/student fee was adopted 30 years later (more on that shortly).
Despite the lack of physical papers and effects from that time, it's not hard to imagine why the UNC Association of Student Governments began. The NC General Assembly in 1971 had just combined all of the state's public institutions of higher education into the 16-campus University of North Carolina; the NC School of Science and Mathematics would become the 17th constituent institution in 2006.
The UNC was to be overseen by a 32-member Board of Governors (16 members elected by the House and 16 elected by the Senate), with each constituent institution having its own 13-member Board of Trustees as an intermediate form of governance (8 members elected by the BOG, 4 members appointed by the Governor, and the Student Body President ex officio).
The students at that time realized the need to network with their counterparts on other campuses to effectively represent student interests, and thus the precursor to the UNC Association of Student Governments was born.
A more modern restatement of why UNCASG exists can be found in Policy 700.3 of the University of North Carolina Policy Manual enacted by the UNC Board of Governors. It recognizes the Association's purposes as follows (these are listed in the first page of the UNCASG Constitution if you want to read along -- see Section IV Item #4 above for the link):
A. represent the students of the University before the University of North Carolina Board of Governors;
B. develop and maintain open lines of communication between institutions, promote each student’s right to a quality education, and promote the issues deemed beneficial to students;
C. actively promote affordable, quality higher education within the State of North Carolina;
D. act as a liaison between the students and the Governor of the State of North Carolina, the North Carolina General Assembly, the Office of the President of the University of North Carolina, and other state and federal officials;
E. address and act on the collective interests of students enrolled in member institutions;
F. involve students in the political process by educating students on the issues affecting them and the university;
G. actively involve students in the area of governmental relations so as to promote the passage or defeat of legislation, which the Association deems relevant to the education of students, their institutions, and higher education in North Carolina;
H. promote and maintain conditions conducive to academic freedom;
I. promote unity and cooperative efforts between the seventeen public institutions of The University of North Carolina; and,
J. provide services and benefits to members of the Association.
An even more concise version can be found in the Association's mission statement, contained in Article I Section 1 of its Constitution:
"Founded and funded by students, the University of North Carolina Association of Student Governments champions the concerns of students and ensures affordability and accessibility to quality education today and tomorrow."
Notice in both of the last two quotations, UNCASG is squarely positioned first and foremost as an advocacy group. It's an organization of student lobbyists designed to network student leaders and collectively promote student causes. The UNCASG President serves as an ex officio non-voting member of the UNC Board of Governors by virtue of state law (NC General Statutes §116-6.1).
The President's role is to be an advocate to the Board, and to do that effectively he or she must be able to speak with authority on the concerns facing all 200,000+ students of the University across its 17 campuses.
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VI. BACKGROUND MATERIAL: WHY DOES THE $1/STUDENT FEE EXIST?
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The UNCASG fee has been a source of controversy since it was created back in 2002, in large measure because people seem to forget (or willfully ignore) why it was created.
I can't speak for the reasons each of the members of the UNC Board of Governors believed when they voted on the fee proposal in 2002, but I can definitively tell you the reasons stated by dozens of student leaders back then based on emails I still have:
1) An office
From its founding until the fee was created, the Association had no permanent location. The UNCASG "office" would move to the Student Government facilities of whatever institution the ASG President was attending at the time. When Jeff Nieman was President in 1998-2000, the office was at UNC Chapel Hill with him. When Andrew Payne was President in 2000-2002, the office was at NC State with him.
If you've ever tried having the US Postal Service forward your mail from multiple addresses within a year, you can imagine how this can become messy very quickly. And that mess gets compounded if the UNCASG President ever came from a campus with limited SG facilities.
So the most frequently stated purpose for creating the $1/student fee was so UNCASG could establish a permanent location and pay rent, have its bills sent to one place, a regular address to use for contracts or mail, and have a permanent base of operations for any needs that would arise in the future.
2) Travel
Prior to the fee, UNCASG was a dues-funded organization. Its budget was minimal and anyone who attended its meetings had to pay for their own transportation, hotel rooms, etc.
The net result of this was not surprising: low participation. At most of the meetings I went to in 1998-1999, it was not unusual to only have 2 of the 5 HBCUs present (typically FSU and NCAT); it was also not unusual to have at least 2-3 of the 5 of the smallest schools absent, and not unusual to have at least 1-2 of the 5 largest schools absent.
So if you're the UNCASG President charged with representing student interests on the Board of Governors, and you can barely get a simple majority of your campuses together at any point in time, how do you defend your position on any issue if someone on the BOG says to you "I don't think you're accurately representing the student voice. Prove it to me."?
With the creation of the fee, UNCASG began covering the hotel costs for meeting attendees and also reimbursed travel expenses to the constituent Student Governments. The new travel funds alone boosted participation in the organization substantially, in turn empowering the ASG President's ability to influence debate on the Board.
3) Student stipends
The 3rd most-cited reason for creating the $1/student UNCASG fee was to be able to provide stipends for its student officers.
While the rationale behind doing so seems to vary depending on who you ask, there were 2 main justifications for this particular piece:
i) people needed to be compensated for their time if they were going to do a good job; and
ii) stipends were needed to ensure people could be considered for UNCASG leadership independent of their financial status.
Former ASG Presidents in the pre-fee era mostly came from UNCCH and NCSU, and most of them had enough cash on their own to do the work of being ASG President without having a job on the side; Jeff Nieman and Andrew Payne in particular have been noted for the personal money they had to invest in the organization to help it grow.
Most candidates from HBCUs or smaller schools simply couldn't do the job -- not because they weren't qualified, but because they lacked the financial resources. That's a bad situation for a "representative" group.
The same stipend rationale was advanced for the appointed Executive Officers as well. Should trust fund babies be given priority for leadership positions? I personally don't think so, which is why we don't include an entry for Adjusted Gross Income on the Executive Officer application (see Section IV, Item #5).
Student leaders at the time believed the same, and rightly so.
4) Permanent staff
Closing out the list of cited reasons for creating the $1/student fee, the group wanted to have a permanent staff member in the office (noted at #1 above).
When student leaders first pitched the fee idea they wanted a full-time lobbyist or Executive Director; there were frequent email conversations with rumors about former ASG Presidents wanting the job, what all the person would do, how much they would get paid, and so on.
The Board of Governors recognized the need for a full-time staff member if the group was going to have a full-time office, but they also recognized (correctly in my opinion) that a lobbyist or Executive Director would inevitably overshadow the elected student leadership.
So in the aforementioned Policy 700.3-7 of the UNC Policy Manual, the Board stipulates that the Association can hire full-time personnel (treated as state employees under the NC State Personnel Act) but they have to be clerical in nature.
This is how the UNCASG Office Manager position came into existence, filled for its first 5 years by Dr. Terry Wall and filled now by Judy Munson.
The Office Manager provides a substantial amount of reliable baseline support that any organization needs to run effectively (answering the phone, paying bills, making copies, being a liaison with UNC General Administration, etc). Its only downside is that UNCASG has no real influence over the position's cost. As an SPA state employee, pay raises and benefits are determined by the NC General Assembly each budget cycle.
The cost of the position is more than worth the work done, at least in my opinion. But even if it were not, some would justifiably consider it a cheap shot to criticize the student leadership of UNCASG for its expense when that leadership has no control over the amount in controversy.
*****
These are all the reasons I've found in my email archives from back then. No reference to scholarships. No reference to co-sponsoring concerts. No reference to buying equipment for campus SGs or anything similar.
The UNCASG fee was created precisely to fill the role it fills -- fund an office, campus travel expenses, student stipends and permanent staff.
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VII. BACKGROUND MATERIAL: "SO WHAT'S THE CONTROVERSY?"
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So if the UNC Association of Student Governments was created for a legitimate purpose, and the creation of the fee for it was done in a deliberative fashion for the purposes in theory that the fee is actually serving in practice, some of you may be wondering why there's a controversy at all.
The simple truth is that the 3 years prior to Ashley's and my election weren't good ones for the Association.
The reasons are numerous, and if you want to grab drinks one day I'll be more than happy to explain all of them to you. But they're all ultimately irrelevant. UNCASG's continuing status as the whipping boy for people who need whipping boys stems from the results over those few years:
1) record low participation that robbed the ASG President of the ability to legitimately speak on behalf of students statewide;
2) failure to use the $1/student fee on the purposes for which it was created, in turn creating a huge surplus that was spent on high-quality junk;
3) poor leadership both among ASG and campus Student Body Presidents, creating among other problems a string of withdrawals, walkouts, and a sense of entitlement in the Executive Branch that the campus delegates existed to serve them instead of the other way around;
4) minimal record-keeping, huge ethical lapses, embarrassing media coverage, and a tendency to over-promise and under-deliver; and
5) the entire 2007-2008 school year (consult the DTH archives for more info).
Did any of this happen last year? Nope. Ashley and I ran on a platform along the lines of "burn everything down and start over" (see Section IV Item #6).
We won by a 1-vote margin in what we assume was the longest election in UNCASG history, but had such phenomenal leadership at the campus-level and among our Executive Officers that we were able to govern with near-unanimity on almost every issue.
The end of our term marked what several long-term ASG observers referred to as the most successful year the Association ever had in its 37-year history (for a brief look at everything that took place last year, see Section IV Item #2(b)).
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VIII. TODAY'S EDITORIAL: THE QUANTITATIVE ERRORS
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Enough background, let's get on with the analysis.
People who have worked with me at NC State and out in the "real world" will tell you I'm usually a pretty good sport when it comes to folks disagreeing with me about a political issue. I appreciate being challenged because it forces me to reexamine my arguments and make them stronger.
I'm not as forgiving for people who intentionally make arguments in bad faith citing factually wrong data for support. That goes double when the person who knows the data is factually wrong (like me) sends a request for a correction to the people using it (like the DTH) and it gets used again later.
So when I read today's editorial in the paper, I was dumbfounded not so much by the blatantly asinine conclusions (I'll get to those in the next section) but moreso by the blatantly asinine factual errors that I had already noted to them previously.
There were at least 4 such complete and total errors in today's editorial. I'll stipulate up front that none of them were integral to the editorial's main argument, but they highlight (at least to me) the shoddy nature of the column's preparation:
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1) "Last weekend, ASG gave final approval to its $260,000 budget for the upcoming year."
This is false. Last weekend ASG gave final approval to the $55,723.84 in surplus funding left over from last year as a result of budget cuts we adopted (see Section IV Item #2(f) and #3(g).
The $202,500.00 base budget was unanimously adopted by all 17 institutions back in April.
This is the exact same error I noted to the paper regarding the Monday news article on ASG's activities for the weekend. For the Editorial Board to repeat it is bad enough; doubly so considering no one from the Board ever contacted me for the information.
There's a reason collegiate journalist ethics strongly recommend Editorial Boards and columnists conduct independent investigation for their editorials.
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2) "Another $42,000 is allocated for travel expenses and hotels — sometimes simply to plan the budget."
This is false, in three instances:
i) Parts of the budget block referenced don't go to travel expenses or hotels at all, but instead to campus-directed publicity so students are aware of the Association and what it does.
ii) In addition, well over half of the allocation for the July meeting was not spent at all as we cut back costs due to the budget crisis… something the Editorial Board would have known had anyone contacted me or bothered to review the August report submitted by the Chief Financial Officer (who, coincidentally, is a UNCCH student).
iii) At no time during my tenure has ASG ever spent any money "simply to plan the budget." I "plan the budget" on my laptop in Microsoft Excel and send it out via email or post it online. ASG does have to vote on the budget in person for it to take effect, but that's a requirement of state law for all public bodies (and, simply as a side note, at no time has ASG ever met just to vote on a budget alone).
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3) "In 2007, ASG’s legitimacy as a representative of the student body suffered another blow. The organization fell into turmoil when Cole Jones, then-president of ASG, resigned after being charged with misdemeanor assault of his aunt. The charges have since been dropped, but questions of the group’s legitimacy remain."
This is false, in two instances:
i) The assault was against the aunt of Jones's son (who was pretty savagely attacking him and jeopardizing said son), not Jones's aunt.
ii) The charges were not "dropped" -- the Superior Court judge issued a directed verdict in Jones's case before Jones even offered his defense, dismissing the charges because they had no legal foundation in the first place. In other words, Jones was wrongly convicted the previous August and never should have resigned.
This of course has no bearing on the point of the editorial itself. But here again we have simple facts erroneously reported in an earlier news piece, of which the DTH was notified at the time, that could have easily been corrected even if that prior notice was never sent had anyone on the Editorial Board made even a half-hearted attempt at independent research (like dialing my phone number).
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4) "In fact, former UNC-CH Student Body President J.J. Raynor did not even attend the meetings personally. She sent a proxy instead, much to the chagrin of the organization. But one can hardly blame her."
This is false, in two instances:
i) President Emeritus Raynor in fact attended multiple ASG meetings, including the July meeting where last year's budget was approved by the Council of Student Body Presidents (see Section IV Item #3(c) for her extensive participation in the budget debate and ultimate "yes" vote) as well as the March meeting where this year's budget was first presented.
ii) If "one can hardly blame her," the DTH Editorial Board evidently didn't get the memo as they blamed her multiple times throughout the semester. Pull up the Google archive copy of the "We need an effective voice" editorial for an example.
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So before even touching the surface of the qualitative conclusions the editorial makes, it's already riddled with so many factual errors that a news reporter would get fired for comparably poor quality.
But dissecting patently false factual errors is a bit like eating a TV dinner for your last meal of the day: it might be fun while you're doing it, but it's not terribly filling.
Let's tackle the main points of the editorial head on…
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IX. TODAY'S EDITORIAL: THE QUALITATIVE CONCLUSIONS
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For the sake of stopping this note from growing even larger than it is already, I'm going to condense the main points of the editorial and offer my thoughts after each one. I gave you the link to the editorial itself up front, so you can decide for yourself if I've missed anything, mischaracterized the DTH's position, and so on.
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1) ASG's budget is a waste for spending money on travel.
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Remember the adage "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" ? The same rule applies to advocacy organizations that have no "hard power" and instead have to rely on the soft power of persuasion.
The $1/student ASG fee was created precisely to enable travel on the part of the constituent institutions. It was easy for UNCCH and NCSU to make it to meetings. It was not easy for most HBCUs and small schools, several of which have no Student Government fee at all on their campus.
While it might sound good on paper to argue that the Association's budget should be spent elsewhere, it's a very elitist, pro-white school, pro-big school mentality that would completely delegitimize the Association and would effectively strip students of their only ability to meaningfully influence statewide education policy through their representative on the Board of Governors.
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2) ASG's budget is a waste for spending so much money on travel. It should cut back.
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We have; see Section IV Item #2(f) and #3(g).
ASG not only cut back in response to the budget crisis, we cut back before the budget crisis even began. The hotels we use are cheap (we pay the state rate or less). Delegations sleep 4 to a room (the max allowed by said cheap hotels). We carpool extensively (last weekend UNCCH's delegates were actually driven by ASG's Executive Officers, simply because we have so many Executive Officers who go to UNCCH). We even have folks use teleconference or videoconference if they don't want to come in person.
The list goes on…
But there's only so much a group can do when they're experiencing record-setting participation on a consistent basis, as UNCASG has since October 2008.
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3) ASG's budget is a waste for spending money on student stipends.
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I'll refer you back to my question in Section VI Item #3: should trust fund babies get higher priority in hiring? I personally don't think so; the DTH Editorial Board apparently disagrees.
As with travel, the $1/student fee was created precisely to fund stipends for ASG leadership. To do otherwise goes back to the elitist, pro-rich mindset that only students with a 401(k) should have the job since they're the only ones who will be able to afford to do it.
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4) ASG's budget is a waste for spending so much money on student stipends.
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This was certainly a hotly deliberated point two summers ago when I presented my first budget to the Council of Student Body Presidents; see Section IV Item #3(c) for the minutes.
Bearing in mind the fee was created for this purpose, the easiest way to ensure the money is not wasted is to (i) make sure the stipend recipients are working at a level that justifies the pay, or (ii) fire them.
Last year 3 Executive Officers were fired within the first 3 months of my term. I think we illustrated pretty well we're willing to let people go. We'll get to the work they've done a few items down.
But even sidestepping the accountability measures, are the stipend amounts really that egregious? We'll use UNC Chapel Hill as an example since that's where the DTH is based, but these numbers generally hold up at most other campuses as well:
UNCASG President: $7,000/yr, 202K students = ~$0.03/FTE
UNCCH SBP: $3,600/yr, 28K students = ~$0.13/FTE
UNCASG Senior VP: $6,000/yr, 202K students = ~$0.03/FTE
UNCCH VP: $2,400/yr, 28K students = ~$0.09/FTE
UNCASG CFO: $4,000/yr, 202K students = ~$0.02/FTE
UNCCH SBT: $2,400/yr, 28K students = ~$0.09/FTE
UNCASG Office Manager: $44.5K/yr, 202K students = $0.22/FTE (full salary)
UNCCH Office Manager: $13K/yr, 28K students = $0.46/FTE (half salary only)
If ASG had a funding scheme typical to a campus Student Government, I'd be raking in $26,000+ a year. But not only do we not operate with a similar funding setup, we froze stipends in place, eliminated perks (e.g. no more officer cell phones), and increased workloads.
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5) ASG doesn't need its budget.
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History tells us otherwise.
When UNCASG substantially cut back in certain areas to "save money" (ironically as a result of complaints from the Daily Tar Heel Editorial Board at the time), the net result was disastrous.
Consider as an example the decision to go from meeting over an entire weekend to just meeting late Friday night and Saturday morning. If you're the President of, say, Western Carolina, are you going to bother making a 10-hour round-trip drive to Raleigh for a meeting that won't even last that long? Probably not, especially if there's a good chance business will get done Friday that you'll have to miss because you don't get out of class until 3pm and will end up hitting rush hour traffic right around Greensboro.
History validated that common sense thinking: delegations stopped showing up, and the money "saved" just started piling up on the side.
So what happened next? The DTH Editorial Board criticized the Association for not being effective since no one was there, and then criticized the Association for running a surplus.
The budget exists to bring together representatives from all 17 campuses on a regular basis, and to enable the Association to execute the decisions made at those meetings. Last year proved beyond all reasonable doubt that we're currently doing that, and doing it very well.
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6) ASG hasn't achieved the goals it has laid out.
********************
This one is just laughable. I was going to put it in the factual error column, but it's a qualitative conclusion so I had to put it here.
See Section IV, Item #6 for the platform and Item #2(e) for the strategic plan. You'll notice just about all of the goals set out were achieved last year.
Out of all 37 years of the Association, the Daily Tar Heel Editorial Board had a 1-in-37 shot at picking the one year where goals not only got achieved but there was voluminous documentation illustrating it.
They're either really lucky or really foolish. I'm still trying to decide which…
********************
7) The time for reforming ASG has come and gone.
********************
Apparently less than a year is long enough to reform a group in the eyes of the DTH Editorial Board.
And maybe they're right. ASG could have finished 100% of its reforms last year and we didn't. Why? Because issues like the bad economy and compulsory student health insurance jumped to center stage and we proactively addressed those instead.
Had we kept our focus on reform, instead of things like tuition / fees / the state budget / etc, we certainly would have reformed the organization -- but we would have completely abdicated our responsibility as student advocates and totally wasted your $1 for the year.
Yet even focusing on those other issues, we still got dramatic reforms done. See Section IV Item #4 for the brand new UNCASG Constitution adopted in August 2008, or Item #3(g) pages 130-146 for the ethical reforms adopted in January 2009.
********************
8) ASG's impact on the system has been marginal.
********************
Tell that to UNC General Administration, who singled out UNCASG for public praise at the August Board of Governors meeting for our involvement on the Student Health Insurance initiative.
Unfortunately none of the DTH news reporters were able to make it, but given the factual errors the Editorial Board made in this column I doubt they would have read any news pieces from the meeting anyway.
Fortunately there were at least 8 students in the room to witness it, including Student Body Presidents from Appalachian State, UNC Wilmington, and Western Carolina, as well as ASG officers from East Carolina, UNC Chapel Hill and UNC Wilmington.
Over the last year UNCASG has had a tangible impact on issues ranging from "bread and butter" topics like tuition and fees (covered by the DTH News Dept), to the sustainability policy getting voted on next month (covered by the DTH News Dept), to the Student Health Insurance initiative (covered by the DTH News Dept), to the state budget (covered by the DTH News Department), to…
…ok I'll stop. But do you notice a theme there?
Again, out of all the possible years in the past 37 to single out for ASG not having an impact, the Editorial Board decided to pick the single year where ASG had (i) a significant impact (ii) across a wide array of issues that (iii) was well-documented by the DTH's own reporters and (iv) thoroughly documented in ASG's own documents.
********************
9) ASG doesn't really do anything.
********************
See Section IV, Items #2(b), #3(d), #3(e), #3(f), #3(g) and #3(h).
Most specious accusation ever.
********************
10) ASG needs to be reevaluated.
********************
ASG was reevaluated… last year.
What was the decision? We had active, consistent participation from all 17 UNC institutions for the first time in the Association's history. We set an all-time record for attendance. We set an all-time record for the number of Executive Officer applicants, as well as an all-time record for the breadth of campuses where those applicants originated.
UNCA, which had withdrawn, returned to the Association. UNCC, which had withdrawn, returned to the Association. UNCSA, which had stopped showing up, returned to the Association. The senior leadership of UNCCH, under the leadership of President Jones, has returned to the Association.
And UNCCH has more Executive Officers in the Association than any other campus in the state… which hurts my soul as a proud NCSU alumnus.
********************
Is there anything more for me to say? Probably.
I could mention the fact they cited me by name regarding a Letter to the Editor I wrote back in April (see the T Greg's Tomes entry at the top of this note)… but conveniently left out the DTH editorial I wrote in response to said essentially the exact opposite of the editorial that ran today.
There are undoubtedly other points to raise as well, but if you've made it this far in the note you're tired of reading. And statements to the contrary notwithstanding, I actually do care about your well-being ;)
==============================
X. CONCLUSION
==========================
I might not be able to defend UNCASG's recent history with a straight face, but I sure as hell can defend everything that has taken place during my administration. Throughout my term UNCASG has maintained absolute transparency and abided by a policy of welcoming outside criticism -- and we still do.
I invite the Daily Tar Heel Editorial Board to continue holding us accountable. But my patience has long since worn out for the infantile rantings of substandard columnists who have their knickers in a twist because they're foolish enough to espouse beliefs that are 1) factually wrong, 2) historically inaccurate, and 3) logically incoherent.
Beyond the Daily Tar Heel, however, we freely encourage and welcome criticism and suggestions from the Student Body at large. We created a website at <http://www.iwantmydollarba
==============================
Before I get started, I want to stipulate at the outset that I have no issue at all whatsoever with the DTH News Department. The coverage of UNCASG by Olivia Bowler, Matt Lynley, Eric Johnson and others has, in my opinion, always been fair.
There have been times where we've disagreed, and yes occasionally there have been factual errors that needed correcting. But in all those instances the reporting was done in good faith. If you've got a reporter who does that on a regular basis, you can't ask for anything better.
So far as I'm aware, I have never complained in any forum about the quality of the news reports relating to UNCASG -- and I haven't been given a reason to start. The news reporters are not responsible for the headlines to their stories (typically done by section editors or copy editors), and they have no role in the editorial process (that's a wholly different operation).
In other words, if you've ever seen me gripe about the DTH's coverage in any capacity, now or in the future, mentally exclude the news reporters from the list of people I'm complaining about.
==============================
II. DISCLAIMER #2: I HAVE A PRETTY GOOD MEMORY… AND EMAIL
==============================
I started at NC State in 1998, long before the $1/student ASG fee ever existed (yes that was a long time ago, but my first years at NCSU also included several of the most traumatic experiences in my life so I remember them pretty well).
For example, I remember attending ASG meetings for NCSU. I remember getting chewed out at one such meeting when I made the mistake of saying I'd support UNCCH in the NCAA playoffs after NCSU had been eliminated. I remember our Student Body President Jenny Chang getting pulled over on the highway to UNCC because she was going 100+ mph in a car that was rattling so bad Teresa and I thought i would fall apart (she somehow talked her way out of a ticket too!). I remember who Nick Marisis was and why he resigned as ASG President. And so on.
Not only do I remember UNCASG back in the 1998-2000 era when I was in it, I remember it during the 2001-2005 era when I was a college dropout because most objective people classify this time span as UNCASG's "heyday". So even though I wasn't a student, I read the NCSU Technician and UNCCH Daily Tar Heel regularly. I remember, for example, writing a letter to the News & Observer complaining about the $1/student fee right after it was created (<http://www.phoenixwebinc.n
And not only do I remember UNCASG from 1998-2000 and 2000-2005, I also remember it from 2005 to the present. Why? I was a student at NC State by then and promptly resumed my position as an editorial columnist at the Technician before rejoining the Student Senate the following year. I remember the resignations, I remember the walkouts, I remember the controversies, and I was actually present in the room for most of them.
Oh and I have almost every single email I've ever sent or received going all the way back to 1999. With multiple archives of each.
Why am I laying this all out? Because every now and then I come across someone who has never been involved with UNCASG who tries to tell me what the group was like back at a given moment in time. Or I see someone who was in ASG at that time and tries to put an extra layer of shine on the past by convincing me of something that simply isn't true.
I've experienced enough of UNCASG across the past 11 years that I can decipher fact from bullshit. And if my memory ever fails, I can always just ask Teresa to confirm or deny my recollection of events… or pull up an email.
==============================
III. DISCLAIMER #3: I DON'T CARE ENOUGH TO LIE OR SPIN
==============================
In tandem with Disclaimer #2, since I know *I* have experienced enough of UNCASG to decipher fact from bullshit, I recognize that *other people* have experienced enough of UNCASG to decipher fact from bullshit as well. I'm actually Facebook friends with a good chunk of them, so they can see this note.
The simple truth is I'm not going to lie to you or slant the truth, because (1) I value my reputation for honesty more than almost anything else in life, (2) I couldn't get away with it even if I tried, and (3) I just don't care enough to make the effort.
Does that mean we're always going to come to the same conclusion from the same set of facts? Not at all. One advantage of being in this position at such a seasoned age is that I've got a different perspective on things compared to when I was an impetuous 17-year-old college freshman trying to remake the world in my image.
But like everything else we did last year in UNCASG, I'm going to give you the facts and I'm going to give you my unvarnished opinion based on those facts regardless if you agree or if your feelings get hurt. My résumé was already amazing long before I became UNCASG President, and it will still be amazing even if I end my presidency as an abject failure (if you need a visual reference, see <http://www.facebook.com/ph
==============================
IV. BACKGROUND MATERIAL: DOCUMENTS
==============================
In dissecting any editorial, it's necessary to have all of the objective facts first. Reasonable people can disagree on the conclusions drawn from those facts, but if those same people are arguing from two different sets of facts then they end up talking past each other.
Fortunately, this past year UNCASG has generated a boatload of documentation on its operations since the organization was so weak at recording things in the past.
Here are some key items you'll want to either print or review online before reading further:
1) Today's Daily Tar Heel editorial "Enough is enough, ASG"
<http://www.dailytarheel.co
2) Legislation adopted by UNCASG and applicable Executive Orders.
I'm listing the versions that were actually voted on by the delegates so we have line numbers to refer to; the final copies are called "engrossed" and look a bit fancier, but have the exact same content otherwise.
a. FB2, Fiscal Year 2010 Non-Recurring Budget Act (38th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
b. AR39, Adjournment Sine Die (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
c. FB33, Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Act (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
d. FB3, Fiscal Year 2009 Budget Act (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
e. R1, 2008-2009 M.A.P. Act (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
f. Executive Order 37-07, FY09 Travel Restrictions (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
3) Other background documents:
a. FB33 Legislative Report (37th Session) (this is a line-by-line comparison of every single change in the recurring budget from last year to this year)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
b. FB33 Student Fees by Campus by Fiscal Year (37th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
c. July 2008 Council of Student Body Presidents minutes (characterized by DTH reporter Eric Johnson at the time as "the best minutes I've seen from ASG in years")
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
d. September 2008 memo to Erskine Bowles and Hannah Gage (re
UNCASG's August 2008 meeting)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
e. October 2008 memo to Erskine Bowles and Hannah Gage (re UNCASG's September 2008 meeting)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
f. January 2009 memo to Erskine Bowles and Hannah Gage (re UNCASG's January 2009 meeting and tuition+fees)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
g. March 2009 quarterly report to the whole UNC Board of Governors (re November 2008 through February 2009 -- warning: this is a 4MB file that weighs in at 212 pages. It'll take awhile to download)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
h. June 2009 memo to Bruce Mallette re the Student Health Insurance initiative
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
4) The UNCASG Constitution
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
5) The Executive Officer Guide and Application (38th Session)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
6) "The Clock is Ticking…" (the platform Ashley and I ran on)
<http://www.iwantmydollarba
There are, quite literally, hundreds of pages worth of other documents generated by ASG that I could include in the reading list here, but for the sake of this particular note there's no real need. If you want to read any of them, please let me know and I'll send you a copy (most are already linked off of our Facebook group "UNCASG: Uniting Campuses, Serving Students").
==============================
V. BACKGROUND MATERIAL: WHY DOES UNCASG EXIST?
==============================
The overwhelming majority of the Association's history is poorly documented (if at all), an unfortunate habit among most student-based organizations particularly in the early part of their lifecycle. The Association's record-keeping was also more hindered than most groups because of its lack of a central location from its founding in 1972 until the $1/student fee was adopted 30 years later (more on that shortly).
Despite the lack of physical papers and effects from that time, it's not hard to imagine why the UNC Association of Student Governments began. The NC General Assembly in 1971 had just combined all of the state's public institutions of higher education into the 16-campus University of North Carolina; the NC School of Science and Mathematics would become the 17th constituent institution in 2006.
The UNC was to be overseen by a 32-member Board of Governors (16 members elected by the House and 16 elected by the Senate), with each constituent institution having its own 13-member Board of Trustees as an intermediate form of governance (8 members elected by the BOG, 4 members appointed by the Governor, and the Student Body President ex officio).
The students at that time realized the need to network with their counterparts on other campuses to effectively represent student interests, and thus the precursor to the UNC Association of Student Governments was born.
A more modern restatement of why UNCASG exists can be found in Policy 700.3 of the University of North Carolina Policy Manual enacted by the UNC Board of Governors. It recognizes the Association's purposes as follows (these are listed in the first page of the UNCASG Constitution if you want to read along -- see Section IV Item #4 above for the link):
A. represent the students of the University before the University of North Carolina Board of Governors;
B. develop and maintain open lines of communication between institutions, promote each student’s right to a quality education, and promote the issues deemed beneficial to students;
C. actively promote affordable, quality higher education within the State of North Carolina;
D. act as a liaison between the students and the Governor of the State of North Carolina, the North Carolina General Assembly, the Office of the President of the University of North Carolina, and other state and federal officials;
E. address and act on the collective interests of students enrolled in member institutions;
F. involve students in the political process by educating students on the issues affecting them and the university;
G. actively involve students in the area of governmental relations so as to promote the passage or defeat of legislation, which the Association deems relevant to the education of students, their institutions, and higher education in North Carolina;
H. promote and maintain conditions conducive to academic freedom;
I. promote unity and cooperative efforts between the seventeen public institutions of The University of North Carolina; and,
J. provide services and benefits to members of the Association.
An even more concise version can be found in the Association's mission statement, contained in Article I Section 1 of its Constitution:
"Founded and funded by students, the University of North Carolina Association of Student Governments champions the concerns of students and ensures affordability and accessibility to quality education today and tomorrow."
Notice in both of the last two quotations, UNCASG is squarely positioned first and foremost as an advocacy group. It's an organization of student lobbyists designed to network student leaders and collectively promote student causes. The UNCASG President serves as an ex officio non-voting member of the UNC Board of Governors by virtue of state law (NC General Statutes §116-6.1).
The President's role is to be an advocate to the Board, and to do that effectively he or she must be able to speak with authority on the concerns facing all 200,000+ students of the University across its 17 campuses.
==========================
VI. BACKGROUND MATERIAL: WHY DOES THE $1/STUDENT FEE EXIST?
==========================
The UNCASG fee has been a source of controversy since it was created back in 2002, in large measure because people seem to forget (or willfully ignore) why it was created.
I can't speak for the reasons each of the members of the UNC Board of Governors believed when they voted on the fee proposal in 2002, but I can definitively tell you the reasons stated by dozens of student leaders back then based on emails I still have:
1) An office
From its founding until the fee was created, the Association had no permanent location. The UNCASG "office" would move to the Student Government facilities of whatever institution the ASG President was attending at the time. When Jeff Nieman was President in 1998-2000, the office was at UNC Chapel Hill with him. When Andrew Payne was President in 2000-2002, the office was at NC State with him.
If you've ever tried having the US Postal Service forward your mail from multiple addresses within a year, you can imagine how this can become messy very quickly. And that mess gets compounded if the UNCASG President ever came from a campus with limited SG facilities.
So the most frequently stated purpose for creating the $1/student fee was so UNCASG could establish a permanent location and pay rent, have its bills sent to one place, a regular address to use for contracts or mail, and have a permanent base of operations for any needs that would arise in the future.
2) Travel
Prior to the fee, UNCASG was a dues-funded organization. Its budget was minimal and anyone who attended its meetings had to pay for their own transportation, hotel rooms, etc.
The net result of this was not surprising: low participation. At most of the meetings I went to in 1998-1999, it was not unusual to only have 2 of the 5 HBCUs present (typically FSU and NCAT); it was also not unusual to have at least 2-3 of the 5 of the smallest schools absent, and not unusual to have at least 1-2 of the 5 largest schools absent.
So if you're the UNCASG President charged with representing student interests on the Board of Governors, and you can barely get a simple majority of your campuses together at any point in time, how do you defend your position on any issue if someone on the BOG says to you "I don't think you're accurately representing the student voice. Prove it to me."?
With the creation of the fee, UNCASG began covering the hotel costs for meeting attendees and also reimbursed travel expenses to the constituent Student Governments. The new travel funds alone boosted participation in the organization substantially, in turn empowering the ASG President's ability to influence debate on the Board.
3) Student stipends
The 3rd most-cited reason for creating the $1/student UNCASG fee was to be able to provide stipends for its student officers.
While the rationale behind doing so seems to vary depending on who you ask, there were 2 main justifications for this particular piece:
i) people needed to be compensated for their time if they were going to do a good job; and
ii) stipends were needed to ensure people could be considered for UNCASG leadership independent of their financial status.
Former ASG Presidents in the pre-fee era mostly came from UNCCH and NCSU, and most of them had enough cash on their own to do the work of being ASG President without having a job on the side; Jeff Nieman and Andrew Payne in particular have been noted for the personal money they had to invest in the organization to help it grow.
Most candidates from HBCUs or smaller schools simply couldn't do the job -- not because they weren't qualified, but because they lacked the financial resources. That's a bad situation for a "representative" group.
The same stipend rationale was advanced for the appointed Executive Officers as well. Should trust fund babies be given priority for leadership positions? I personally don't think so, which is why we don't include an entry for Adjusted Gross Income on the Executive Officer application (see Section IV, Item #5).
Student leaders at the time believed the same, and rightly so.
4) Permanent staff
Closing out the list of cited reasons for creating the $1/student fee, the group wanted to have a permanent staff member in the office (noted at #1 above).
When student leaders first pitched the fee idea they wanted a full-time lobbyist or Executive Director; there were frequent email conversations with rumors about former ASG Presidents wanting the job, what all the person would do, how much they would get paid, and so on.
The Board of Governors recognized the need for a full-time staff member if the group was going to have a full-time office, but they also recognized (correctly in my opinion) that a lobbyist or Executive Director would inevitably overshadow the elected student leadership.
So in the aforementioned Policy 700.3-7 of the UNC Policy Manual, the Board stipulates that the Association can hire full-time personnel (treated as state employees under the NC State Personnel Act) but they have to be clerical in nature.
This is how the UNCASG Office Manager position came into existence, filled for its first 5 years by Dr. Terry Wall and filled now by Judy Munson.
The Office Manager provides a substantial amount of reliable baseline support that any organization needs to run effectively (answering the phone, paying bills, making copies, being a liaison with UNC General Administration, etc). Its only downside is that UNCASG has no real influence over the position's cost. As an SPA state employee, pay raises and benefits are determined by the NC General Assembly each budget cycle.
The cost of the position is more than worth the work done, at least in my opinion. But even if it were not, some would justifiably consider it a cheap shot to criticize the student leadership of UNCASG for its expense when that leadership has no control over the amount in controversy.
*****
These are all the reasons I've found in my email archives from back then. No reference to scholarships. No reference to co-sponsoring concerts. No reference to buying equipment for campus SGs or anything similar.
The UNCASG fee was created precisely to fill the role it fills -- fund an office, campus travel expenses, student stipends and permanent staff.
==============================
VII. BACKGROUND MATERIAL: "SO WHAT'S THE CONTROVERSY?"
==============================
So if the UNC Association of Student Governments was created for a legitimate purpose, and the creation of the fee for it was done in a deliberative fashion for the purposes in theory that the fee is actually serving in practice, some of you may be wondering why there's a controversy at all.
The simple truth is that the 3 years prior to Ashley's and my election weren't good ones for the Association.
The reasons are numerous, and if you want to grab drinks one day I'll be more than happy to explain all of them to you. But they're all ultimately irrelevant. UNCASG's continuing status as the whipping boy for people who need whipping boys stems from the results over those few years:
1) record low participation that robbed the ASG President of the ability to legitimately speak on behalf of students statewide;
2) failure to use the $1/student fee on the purposes for which it was created, in turn creating a huge surplus that was spent on high-quality junk;
3) poor leadership both among ASG and campus Student Body Presidents, creating among other problems a string of withdrawals, walkouts, and a sense of entitlement in the Executive Branch that the campus delegates existed to serve them instead of the other way around;
4) minimal record-keeping, huge ethical lapses, embarrassing media coverage, and a tendency to over-promise and under-deliver; and
5) the entire 2007-2008 school year (consult the DTH archives for more info).
Did any of this happen last year? Nope. Ashley and I ran on a platform along the lines of "burn everything down and start over" (see Section IV Item #6).
We won by a 1-vote margin in what we assume was the longest election in UNCASG history, but had such phenomenal leadership at the campus-level and among our Executive Officers that we were able to govern with near-unanimity on almost every issue.
The end of our term marked what several long-term ASG observers referred to as the most successful year the Association ever had in its 37-year history (for a brief look at everything that took place last year, see Section IV Item #2(b)).
==============================
VIII. TODAY'S EDITORIAL: THE QUANTITATIVE ERRORS
==========================
Enough background, let's get on with the analysis.
People who have worked with me at NC State and out in the "real world" will tell you I'm usually a pretty good sport when it comes to folks disagreeing with me about a political issue. I appreciate being challenged because it forces me to reexamine my arguments and make them stronger.
I'm not as forgiving for people who intentionally make arguments in bad faith citing factually wrong data for support. That goes double when the person who knows the data is factually wrong (like me) sends a request for a correction to the people using it (like the DTH) and it gets used again later.
So when I read today's editorial in the paper, I was dumbfounded not so much by the blatantly asinine conclusions (I'll get to those in the next section) but moreso by the blatantly asinine factual errors that I had already noted to them previously.
There were at least 4 such complete and total errors in today's editorial. I'll stipulate up front that none of them were integral to the editorial's main argument, but they highlight (at least to me) the shoddy nature of the column's preparation:
**********
1) "Last weekend, ASG gave final approval to its $260,000 budget for the upcoming year."
This is false. Last weekend ASG gave final approval to the $55,723.84 in surplus funding left over from last year as a result of budget cuts we adopted (see Section IV Item #2(f) and #3(g).
The $202,500.00 base budget was unanimously adopted by all 17 institutions back in April.
This is the exact same error I noted to the paper regarding the Monday news article on ASG's activities for the weekend. For the Editorial Board to repeat it is bad enough; doubly so considering no one from the Board ever contacted me for the information.
There's a reason collegiate journalist ethics strongly recommend Editorial Boards and columnists conduct independent investigation for their editorials.
**********
**********
2) "Another $42,000 is allocated for travel expenses and hotels — sometimes simply to plan the budget."
This is false, in three instances:
i) Parts of the budget block referenced don't go to travel expenses or hotels at all, but instead to campus-directed publicity so students are aware of the Association and what it does.
ii) In addition, well over half of the allocation for the July meeting was not spent at all as we cut back costs due to the budget crisis… something the Editorial Board would have known had anyone contacted me or bothered to review the August report submitted by the Chief Financial Officer (who, coincidentally, is a UNCCH student).
iii) At no time during my tenure has ASG ever spent any money "simply to plan the budget." I "plan the budget" on my laptop in Microsoft Excel and send it out via email or post it online. ASG does have to vote on the budget in person for it to take effect, but that's a requirement of state law for all public bodies (and, simply as a side note, at no time has ASG ever met just to vote on a budget alone).
**********
**********
3) "In 2007, ASG’s legitimacy as a representative of the student body suffered another blow. The organization fell into turmoil when Cole Jones, then-president of ASG, resigned after being charged with misdemeanor assault of his aunt. The charges have since been dropped, but questions of the group’s legitimacy remain."
This is false, in two instances:
i) The assault was against the aunt of Jones's son (who was pretty savagely attacking him and jeopardizing said son), not Jones's aunt.
ii) The charges were not "dropped" -- the Superior Court judge issued a directed verdict in Jones's case before Jones even offered his defense, dismissing the charges because they had no legal foundation in the first place. In other words, Jones was wrongly convicted the previous August and never should have resigned.
This of course has no bearing on the point of the editorial itself. But here again we have simple facts erroneously reported in an earlier news piece, of which the DTH was notified at the time, that could have easily been corrected even if that prior notice was never sent had anyone on the Editorial Board made even a half-hearted attempt at independent research (like dialing my phone number).
**********
**********
4) "In fact, former UNC-CH Student Body President J.J. Raynor did not even attend the meetings personally. She sent a proxy instead, much to the chagrin of the organization. But one can hardly blame her."
This is false, in two instances:
i) President Emeritus Raynor in fact attended multiple ASG meetings, including the July meeting where last year's budget was approved by the Council of Student Body Presidents (see Section IV Item #3(c) for her extensive participation in the budget debate and ultimate "yes" vote) as well as the March meeting where this year's budget was first presented.
ii) If "one can hardly blame her," the DTH Editorial Board evidently didn't get the memo as they blamed her multiple times throughout the semester. Pull up the Google archive copy of the "We need an effective voice" editorial for an example.
**********
So before even touching the surface of the qualitative conclusions the editorial makes, it's already riddled with so many factual errors that a news reporter would get fired for comparably poor quality.
But dissecting patently false factual errors is a bit like eating a TV dinner for your last meal of the day: it might be fun while you're doing it, but it's not terribly filling.
Let's tackle the main points of the editorial head on…
==============================
IX. TODAY'S EDITORIAL: THE QUALITATIVE CONCLUSIONS
==============================
For the sake of stopping this note from growing even larger than it is already, I'm going to condense the main points of the editorial and offer my thoughts after each one. I gave you the link to the editorial itself up front, so you can decide for yourself if I've missed anything, mischaracterized the DTH's position, and so on.
********************
1) ASG's budget is a waste for spending money on travel.
********************
Remember the adage "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" ? The same rule applies to advocacy organizations that have no "hard power" and instead have to rely on the soft power of persuasion.
The $1/student ASG fee was created precisely to enable travel on the part of the constituent institutions. It was easy for UNCCH and NCSU to make it to meetings. It was not easy for most HBCUs and small schools, several of which have no Student Government fee at all on their campus.
While it might sound good on paper to argue that the Association's budget should be spent elsewhere, it's a very elitist, pro-white school, pro-big school mentality that would completely delegitimize the Association and would effectively strip students of their only ability to meaningfully influence statewide education policy through their representative on the Board of Governors.
********************
2) ASG's budget is a waste for spending so much money on travel. It should cut back.
********************
We have; see Section IV Item #2(f) and #3(g).
ASG not only cut back in response to the budget crisis, we cut back before the budget crisis even began. The hotels we use are cheap (we pay the state rate or less). Delegations sleep 4 to a room (the max allowed by said cheap hotels). We carpool extensively (last weekend UNCCH's delegates were actually driven by ASG's Executive Officers, simply because we have so many Executive Officers who go to UNCCH). We even have folks use teleconference or videoconference if they don't want to come in person.
The list goes on…
But there's only so much a group can do when they're experiencing record-setting participation on a consistent basis, as UNCASG has since October 2008.
********************
3) ASG's budget is a waste for spending money on student stipends.
********************
I'll refer you back to my question in Section VI Item #3: should trust fund babies get higher priority in hiring? I personally don't think so; the DTH Editorial Board apparently disagrees.
As with travel, the $1/student fee was created precisely to fund stipends for ASG leadership. To do otherwise goes back to the elitist, pro-rich mindset that only students with a 401(k) should have the job since they're the only ones who will be able to afford to do it.
********************
4) ASG's budget is a waste for spending so much money on student stipends.
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This was certainly a hotly deliberated point two summers ago when I presented my first budget to the Council of Student Body Presidents; see Section IV Item #3(c) for the minutes.
Bearing in mind the fee was created for this purpose, the easiest way to ensure the money is not wasted is to (i) make sure the stipend recipients are working at a level that justifies the pay, or (ii) fire them.
Last year 3 Executive Officers were fired within the first 3 months of my term. I think we illustrated pretty well we're willing to let people go. We'll get to the work they've done a few items down.
But even sidestepping the accountability measures, are the stipend amounts really that egregious? We'll use UNC Chapel Hill as an example since that's where the DTH is based, but these numbers generally hold up at most other campuses as well:
UNCASG President: $7,000/yr, 202K students = ~$0.03/FTE
UNCCH SBP: $3,600/yr, 28K students = ~$0.13/FTE
UNCASG Senior VP: $6,000/yr, 202K students = ~$0.03/FTE
UNCCH VP: $2,400/yr, 28K students = ~$0.09/FTE
UNCASG CFO: $4,000/yr, 202K students = ~$0.02/FTE
UNCCH SBT: $2,400/yr, 28K students = ~$0.09/FTE
UNCASG Office Manager: $44.5K/yr, 202K students = $0.22/FTE (full salary)
UNCCH Office Manager: $13K/yr, 28K students = $0.46/FTE (half salary only)
If ASG had a funding scheme typical to a campus Student Government, I'd be raking in $26,000+ a year. But not only do we not operate with a similar funding setup, we froze stipends in place, eliminated perks (e.g. no more officer cell phones), and increased workloads.
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5) ASG doesn't need its budget.
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History tells us otherwise.
When UNCASG substantially cut back in certain areas to "save money" (ironically as a result of complaints from the Daily Tar Heel Editorial Board at the time), the net result was disastrous.
Consider as an example the decision to go from meeting over an entire weekend to just meeting late Friday night and Saturday morning. If you're the President of, say, Western Carolina, are you going to bother making a 10-hour round-trip drive to Raleigh for a meeting that won't even last that long? Probably not, especially if there's a good chance business will get done Friday that you'll have to miss because you don't get out of class until 3pm and will end up hitting rush hour traffic right around Greensboro.
History validated that common sense thinking: delegations stopped showing up, and the money "saved" just started piling up on the side.
So what happened next? The DTH Editorial Board criticized the Association for not being effective since no one was there, and then criticized the Association for running a surplus.
The budget exists to bring together representatives from all 17 campuses on a regular basis, and to enable the Association to execute the decisions made at those meetings. Last year proved beyond all reasonable doubt that we're currently doing that, and doing it very well.
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6) ASG hasn't achieved the goals it has laid out.
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This one is just laughable. I was going to put it in the factual error column, but it's a qualitative conclusion so I had to put it here.
See Section IV, Item #6 for the platform and Item #2(e) for the strategic plan. You'll notice just about all of the goals set out were achieved last year.
Out of all 37 years of the Association, the Daily Tar Heel Editorial Board had a 1-in-37 shot at picking the one year where goals not only got achieved but there was voluminous documentation illustrating it.
They're either really lucky or really foolish. I'm still trying to decide which…
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7) The time for reforming ASG has come and gone.
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Apparently less than a year is long enough to reform a group in the eyes of the DTH Editorial Board.
And maybe they're right. ASG could have finished 100% of its reforms last year and we didn't. Why? Because issues like the bad economy and compulsory student health insurance jumped to center stage and we proactively addressed those instead.
Had we kept our focus on reform, instead of things like tuition / fees / the state budget / etc, we certainly would have reformed the organization -- but we would have completely abdicated our responsibility as student advocates and totally wasted your $1 for the year.
Yet even focusing on those other issues, we still got dramatic reforms done. See Section IV Item #4 for the brand new UNCASG Constitution adopted in August 2008, or Item #3(g) pages 130-146 for the ethical reforms adopted in January 2009.
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8) ASG's impact on the system has been marginal.
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Tell that to UNC General Administration, who singled out UNCASG for public praise at the August Board of Governors meeting for our involvement on the Student Health Insurance initiative.
Unfortunately none of the DTH news reporters were able to make it, but given the factual errors the Editorial Board made in this column I doubt they would have read any news pieces from the meeting anyway.
Fortunately there were at least 8 students in the room to witness it, including Student Body Presidents from Appalachian State, UNC Wilmington, and Western Carolina, as well as ASG officers from East Carolina, UNC Chapel Hill and UNC Wilmington.
Over the last year UNCASG has had a tangible impact on issues ranging from "bread and butter" topics like tuition and fees (covered by the DTH News Dept), to the sustainability policy getting voted on next month (covered by the DTH News Dept), to the Student Health Insurance initiative (covered by the DTH News Dept), to the state budget (covered by the DTH News Department), to…
…ok I'll stop. But do you notice a theme there?
Again, out of all the possible years in the past 37 to single out for ASG not having an impact, the Editorial Board decided to pick the single year where ASG had (i) a significant impact (ii) across a wide array of issues that (iii) was well-documented by the DTH's own reporters and (iv) thoroughly documented in ASG's own documents.
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9) ASG doesn't really do anything.
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See Section IV, Items #2(b), #3(d), #3(e), #3(f), #3(g) and #3(h).
Most specious accusation ever.
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10) ASG needs to be reevaluated.
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ASG was reevaluated… last year.
What was the decision? We had active, consistent participation from all 17 UNC institutions for the first time in the Association's history. We set an all-time record for attendance. We set an all-time record for the number of Executive Officer applicants, as well as an all-time record for the breadth of campuses where those applicants originated.
UNCA, which had withdrawn, returned to the Association. UNCC, which had withdrawn, returned to the Association. UNCSA, which had stopped showing up, returned to the Association. The senior leadership of UNCCH, under the leadership of President Jones, has returned to the Association.
And UNCCH has more Executive Officers in the Association than any other campus in the state… which hurts my soul as a proud NCSU alumnus.
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Is there anything more for me to say? Probably.
I could mention the fact they cited me by name regarding a Letter to the Editor I wrote back in April (see the T Greg's Tomes entry at the top of this note)… but conveniently left out the DTH editorial I wrote in response to said essentially the exact opposite of the editorial that ran today.
There are undoubtedly other points to raise as well, but if you've made it this far in the note you're tired of reading. And statements to the contrary notwithstanding, I actually do care about your well-being ;)
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X. CONCLUSION
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I might not be able to defend UNCASG's recent history with a straight face, but I sure as hell can defend everything that has taken place during my administration. Throughout my term UNCASG has maintained absolute transparency and abided by a policy of welcoming outside criticism -- and we still do.
I invite the Daily Tar Heel Editorial Board to continue holding us accountable. But my patience has long since worn out for the infantile rantings of substandard columnists who have their knickers in a twist because they're foolish enough to espouse beliefs that are 1) factually wrong, 2) historically inaccurate, and 3) logically incoherent.
Beyond the Daily Tar Heel, however, we freely encourage and welcome criticism and suggestions from the Student Body at large. We created a website at <http://www.iwantmydollarba
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