Stay involved in fee review

Any student intrigued by the recent restructuring of the University's senior leadership should be equally interested in the new administration's attitude toward student involvement in institutional decision-making. Will the board of trustees' trumpet call-to-action, with its apparent move away from our deliberative business-as-usual, maintain or minimize the role of students in campus decision-\nmaking?\nNo better example of meaningful student involvement in that deliberative process can be found than the Committee for Fee Review, which even now is in the midst of its annual hearings and deliberations. Seven voting student members, co-chaired by the IU Student Association president and the Graduate and Professional Student Organization moderator, review all mandatory fees paid by Bloomington campus students. Their recommendations about those fees -- some 14 in all, including the technology, transportation and health fees -- have nearly always decided the matter. And everything from the Student Recreational Sports Center to expanded psychiatric care in Counseling and Psychological Services has resulted.\nAs a symbol of the University's abiding commitment to engage students in the civic life of the campus community, the committee is unparalleled. Even so, relatively few students know about this example of their collective political voice, and it might at first seem unimpressive. But when you consider the sum involved -- nearly $28 million each year -- the responsibility long ceded by the Bloomington campus administration to this disinterested group of students is remarkable. Student leaders from other schools envy the influence our students enjoy through this process. \nEight years serving as the administrative liaison to the Committee for Fee Review has made me a true believer in its substantive importance and symbolic value. The student members take their role very seriously. They probe and question and almost always produce wise \nrecommendations. \nIn recent years, the committee has made possible, for instance, a student-run television station, universal bus access, a 7 percent decrease in the undergraduate technology fee with no reduction in services, a dramatic shift toward funding the small and otherwise unfunded groups that comprise the overwhelming majority of the campus's 511 student \norganizations and a newspaper readership program that offers students daily access to print versions of the New York Times and USA Today. \nOn the flip side, the Committee's carefully considered recommendation to eliminate the mandatory student subsidy to athletics clearly influenced the administration's recent decision to withdraw that controversial fee.\nThe committee's list of influences on the campus' climate and culture could go on and on. But there is nothing indelibly written that promises this good and fair arrangement will always be. Indeed, some people may find the process less than good and fair. For them, a fee-setting process led by students may be too slow, too messy or too perilous. This example of our business-as-usual, particularly the part involving deference to student opinion, may be seen by some as an impediment to institutional efficiency and progress. But I hope not.\nWhether the new University order will maintain a commitment to the Committee for Fee Review process -- not to mention countless other long-standing examples of meaningful student engagement in institutional decision-making -- is too early to tell. But students and their leaders should care about the answer to that question, and I'm willing to bet $28 million that they do.