Editorial: SFC oversteps its bounds

At Portland State, the fate of upwards of $18 million in student fees lies in the hands of the eight students who make up the Student Fee Committee.
 
While the amount of funds fluctuates each year, the SFC is charged with the same task: allocate millions of dollars in student fees to more than 150 student groups and departments at Portland State.

The SFC is expected to make its recommendations for student fee allocations based primarily on how much a student group contributes to the Portland State community and upholds its mission statement.

And, as Article IV of the SFC Guidelines proves, the evaluation of a student group’s contributions to the campus community should not include either the group’s makeup or its content.

The reason this is even worth re-stating is that this year’s SFC asked four student fee-funded groups, including the Vanguard, to provide a breakdown of minorities that they employ, specifically asking about sexual orientation, age, disability and ethnicity.

The leaders of these groups were required to collect the necessary information about their staffs and report them to the SFC in the form of figures and percentages.

SFC Chair Aimeera Flint expressed earlier in the academic year that the committee would promote diversity, and said Thursday that the four groups—the Vanguard, Academic Auxiliary Activities, Portland State Professional Sound (PSPS) and Smith Memorial Student Union—were selected because they appeared to lack diversity.

Flint said the SFC had no plans to use the responses to this question to determine how much a funding a group would receive and it was put in place to spark a dialogue about the topic of diversity.

However, at the Vanguard’s budget hearing, a 15-minute session where group leaders present their budget and respond to questions from the SFC, the vast majority of the SFC’s questions revolved around how many minorities the student paper employs rather than funding concerns.

The fact that the SFC would spend the majority of the hearing asking about the number of minorities on staff proves that the answers to those questions have to factor into the committee’s decision making—and not just slightly.

Reid McCargar, co-coordinator of PSPS, said that he feels his group’s budget was not being evaluated according to the guidelines and doubts that it is being handled objectively. We agree with McCargar. The SFC lost its objectivity with this line of questioning.

While the notion of promoting diversity on a college campus is noble and significant, the SFC should not be the body responsible for accomplishing this end, nor should student groups be expected to ask their staff members how they identify sexually or what their ethnicity is for the purposes of getting their budgets approved.

While student body president Hannah Fisher is somewhat at fault because student groups were subject to this question under her watch, she says it best when she claims that the SFC had its hearts in the right place even though the line of questioning was inappropriate.

Fisher, who has apologized to the Vanguard, is right. If the SFC were any other student group, its goal to promote diversity would be acceptable. However, when a single committee is handling the allocation of millions of dollars in student fees, asking student groups about their makeup is an invasion of privacy.

The SFC is meant to be objective and to provide the student groups that makeup the fabric of the campus community the necessary funds to operate.

To pose these sorts of questions to student groups is alarming and shows a level of naiveté on the part of the SFC. The SFC’s gross misunderstanding of its responsibilities and lack of tact also sets a dangerous precedent.

Fisher—who we applaud for quelling the situation once she found out about it—said that questions of this nature will not be asked again. However, we must ensure that truly happens.

It is the responsibility of students and those in student government positions to ensure that future groups are not forced to endure the treatment these four groups received.

Students must understand the importance of voting in student government elections and must understand that activism has no place when deciding how to allocate student fees.

Flint and the SFC got one part of the equation right—diversity is important. But the committee’s execution completely missed the mark.