Listen up, IUSA

After foregoing salaries for the 2011-12 academic year, the IU Student Association has reinstated executive salaries for 2012-13.

“This year’s budget grants $3,000 to each of the executive positions, representing about a fifth of the budget. These salaries are accompanied by analysis of performance by administrators, who can withhold the money if job performance isn’t up to par,” according to Thursday’s Indiana Daily Student article.

This should make you skeptical.

If University administrators evaluate IUSA performance, won’t the IUSA be less likely to oppose their policies?

How commanding does a IU Board of Trustees-approved student government appear?

I don’t oppose salaries for IUSA executives. They’re students like the rest of us, and students need money.

However, unlike the rest of us, the IUSA gets paid by students. We should have a say in what it does.

“No compensation really means no consequence for focusing on things other than IUSA,” IUSA President Kyle Straub said in the same IDS article.

While I wish money weren’t the only binding incentive to improve student well-being, it makes a good one.

If we’re going to get our money’s worth out of those executive salaries, we need to make demands. I have a few.

Representation

Meetings with IU higher-ups are no longer open forum.

The IUSA needs to let students know when it meets with IU administration and the IU trustees.

After the IU trustees effectively removed the University Chancellor, the IUSA is one of our only University-sanctioned means of reaching out to IU administration.

We need to make our voices heard, or our increasing tuition will continue to fill the pockets of administrators.

Since less money is going toward initiatives and $10,000 is going toward marketing, it should be easier for the IUSA to reach out to us.

Transparency

When a fifth of the student-funded IUSA budget goes to salaries, we should know what it’s paying for.

We deserve to know when IUSA makes decisions, what it’s deciding and why it’s deciding it.

The IUSA website hasn’t been updated since February.

I want to know what our salaried executives plan to do with the rest of our money this year.

The website would be a convenient place to make these plans available to
students.

And I hope the IUSA remembers to ask students what we want from it.

Initiatives that matter

You know what the touch screen in the Herman B Wells Library has done
for me?

Nothing.

Let’s take the administration to task about tuition increases.

Let’s keep administrative bureaucracy outside of classrooms.

Let’s investigate hazing and the culture of violence in the greek system.

Let’s demand the administration voices committed condemnation of sexual assault and rape on and off campus, rather than intermittently issuing objective reports via email.

Let’s force our student government to at least try to make substantive differences on campus.

When an unopposed ticket decides to pay itself, I assume the worst.

Prove me wrong, IUSA.

Of course, I’m game for more radical political action. Nothing else seems to work.

­— ptbeane@indiana.edu