Revised fee unsatisfactory

Certainly it must feel like we, the students, are beating a dead horse. Numerous campus groups have expressed opposition to the idea of a $30 athletics fee levied against every student to help close the outrageous athletics budget deficit. We, at the Indiana Daily Student, have expressed our own steadfast opposition as clearly as we can.\nBut Friday -- and oh, how convenient, the day before graduation -- the IU board of trustees didn't listen to students and passed a "compromise" one-time student athletics fee, which will impose $30 on each student for the 2004-05 school year. The horse we are beating, you see, was never dead -- any if anything, now it is more alive than ever.\nIn addition to the vote, which was delayed from the April meeting so more research could be conducted, the trustees also directed the IU administration to identify possible alternatives to the athletics fee -- of course, while charging us $30 until then.\nForget for a moment all the unforgettable facts. Forget there is a $5 million athletics department deficit growing by $2 million each year. Forget internal audits show many of these deficits have been around since 1998, but went hidden and undocumented. Forget tuition has already been raised by 4 percent for next year. And forget, in the words of Trustee Patrick Shoulders -- who provided the only vote against the fee -- that this is applying "a Band-Aid to something that needs stitches."\nFocus, if you will, on the one question we have continually asked that has gone unanswered -- Why exactly is this the students' responsibility?\nIt is not the students who run a fiscally irresponsible athletics department that has been out of control for years, but it is the students who are being asked to provide the money to cancel out the results of someone else's poor decisions. It's as if someone went out and, in a wild weekend of hedonism, acquired an STD and suddenly expects his or her roommate to pay the medical bill.\nThe irony is many people bemoan the lack of student participation in the happenings of the campus, yet when students come out jointly to express their discontent over an inexplicable athletics fee, they are flippantly ignored. Perhaps they're fully aware which side athletics department administrators would end up on if students were given a referendum to their performance.\nSo we're extending a rather gracious opportunity to President Adam Herbert, to Athletic Director Terry Clapacs and to any member of the IU board of trustees -- We would like you to explain to us why it is solely the responsibility of the student body to save the athletics department's reckless rear-end.\nWe would also like an explanation from Clapacs specifically as to why he believed any proposal which did not contain money from students would not be acceptable.\nOf course their explanations may not appease our dissatisfaction with their decision. But at the very least, they owe it to us to explain why such an unaccountable decision, which solely affects us, was made in the first place.