Are your eyes itchy, scratchy, red and puffy? A slight hacking cough? No, it's not due to allergy season, but rather to the wool that's being pulled over your eyes by people who are consequently trying to cram the Memorial Union/Student Recreation Complex expansion down your throats.
Surely you've heard by now of the proposed expansion of the MU and SRC. Yes, you heard it, more fees on top of an imminent $335 tuition increase. At the rate tuition has been increasing in the past couple of years, imagine how much you'll be paying in 2007 when you'll also be paying $155 a semester for the SRC and MU.
While this expansion referendum is hiding behind the guise of a good idea (I mean, really, who doesn't want a new squash court in the SRC?), the timeliness of the whole ordeal is placing students at a critical and somewhat uncomfortable position. The MU should've been expanded years ago, and according to the project development budget, expansion will cost $95 million for the MU alone, while the SRC will cost upwards of $55 million.
The Get Out The Vote campaign, funded primarily by the MU and SRC, has promoted itself as being unbiased. While that point remains highly debatable, the campaign certainly has its fair share of ambiguities while taking an "everyone-else-is-doing-it" attitude. According to GOTV's marketing material, "The long lines at Starbucks and the treadmills aren't the only signs that the student population is growing at Arizona State University."
I would certainly hope not.
I do remember a time when education was top priority at universities. Evidently some people haven't been paying attention to the long lines at the Registrar's office, financial aid office, Residential Life office, Student Health or Computing Commons.
"In the next five years, over 4,000 new beds will be added to the campus and increasing enrollment will take place," GOTV says. So, from this you've deduced that the MU and SRC are now ASU's top priorities? Shouldn't the University be more concerned with things like class size, student to adviser ratio, classroom improvement, or investing in academic programs that have immense potential to become the best in their disciplines?
Brailsford & Dunlavey, the Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm that conducted "extensive research" through surveys noted five themes to enhance the quality of life at ASU, one being to attract and retain high quality students. Are the SRC and MU now the scales by which we judge our students? I'm positive that this is why we now have so many National Merit Scholars.
Seven years ago, our rivals at UA put forth a referendum so similar it's frightening. Proposing only a $40 fee, the referendum failed miserably at the polls, and the students decided the fate of their union. Tomorrow and Thursday, you too will have the same choice in your hands.
Of course, as The Arizona Daily Wildcat affirmed several years ago, "Newspapers don't determine results, voters do." Whatever you do, get your Starbuck's Italian roast coffee soon to allow you enough time to wait in line to vote at the polls.
John Ronquillo is a journalism senior waiting in line for a Vanilla Creme Frappucino. Reach him at johnron@asu.edu.
