By Nick Muscavage
Staff Writer
April 2, 2015
The Student Association senate meeting on April 1 began with the three guest speakers: Interim Vice President for Student Success Michael Christakis, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost James Stellar, and University at Albany President Robert J. Jones. The speakers’ main purpose was to address student outreach. In his speech, Christakis mentioned that earlier in the same day there was a decent turnout of around 30 students who attended “Coffee and Conversation” at Coccadotts in the Campus Center with Stellar and himself. He brought up an event called “Pizza with the Provost” that is occurring Monday, April 6 and also encourages student outreach and communication.
Jones joked about probably being contacted for a coffee and pizza budget right before expressing how proud he is of the time and effort put in by the student body, which he said was a critical component of the undergraduate experience. Jones then went on to trace the decrease in enrollment that UAlbany has been experiencing over the past eight years.
He commended Christakis and Stellar for inventing new methods and techniques of reaching out to students and explained that a close relationship between student success and academic affairs is key to student involvement and outreach.
“Having spent 34 and a half years in higher education and having at one point in my life been both the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and the Vice Provost for Student Affairs at the University of Minnesota, I know first hand how important it is for these two offices to work together seamlessly,” he said.
Jones outlined new methods that he plans on introducing to gain a better understanding of student interests and gauge student success over the course of their education until graduation.
“We’re going to be doing something that you all, or levering something, that you all use everyday. We’re going to be using data and technology driven assistance to better track students and making sure they’re on track for graduation,” he said. He also said he believes the creation of a School of Engineering and Applied Sciences would put us back on top and help combat the issue of declining enrollment. He also pointed to developing a deeper relationship with pharmaceutical and health majors and the UAlbany East Campus as other means to increase enrollment.
“So do you think that it’s coincidental that eight years ago [sic] our school had a reputation for more of a social aspect and further do you think that it might be a step in the right direction if we recognized Fountain Day?” said a senator.
“I can assure if anything Fountain Day was a detriment to the enrollment,” said Jones. “People have seen through videos and other things how you students got out of hand. Students don’t understand how that kind of behavior, particularly this contemporary technology driven society, how that can live for a very long time in the reputation of the university.” He concluded by saying that a lot of parents wouldn’t want to send their kids to a school with a reputation for being violent or dangerous and how that affects enrollment. He said that the fountain is less than two feet deep and therefore too shallow for an event like that to take place.
Student Activity Fee: Mandatory or Voluntary?
The largest issue at stake at this particular SA meeting was the fate of the Student Activity Fee being mandatory or voluntary. The Student Activity Fee is a fee of $ 100 per semester paid by every student who is enrolled in 12 or more credits at UAlbany. It is a referendum that is voted upon the student body every two years. The ballot is simple with two options: mandatory or voluntary.
For the first time in UAlbany’s history, the result of the referendum was that the Student Activity Fee be voluntary. According to the SA elections commission, the outcome of the vote was proven not up to standards with UAlbany’s official ballot regulations. It was decided that the ballots be reformatted and recast for a proper vote. The voting dates are from April 1 to April 3, 2015.
Ed Engelbride, Associate Vice President for Student Success, explained that this referendum has existed for SUNY schools since the 1970’s.
“SUNY board of trustees established a policy that requires students to vote whether the fee is mandatory or voluntary. It is a fee that the students at each state operated campus have total control over,” he said.
Daniel Markisello, Chair of SA Senate and Chair of Board of Finance, has been in SA for three years now. He explained that this year’s Student Activity Fee vote was invalid due to an obstinate third choice on the ballots that threw off the outcome of the votes.
There have only been two other cases of the student activity fee being voluntary out of all the SUNY schools, and in both cases it was due to a technical error and didn’t last longer than a month, according to Engelbride.
“Some of these challenges in the past have happened through a change in technology,” Engelbride said. He explained that the switch to an internet based voting system from paper caused the errors.
This year was the first year that UAlbany relied on MyInvolvement for the Student Activity Fee referendum. The last year they used MyUAlbany under PeopleSoft.
If the Student Activity Fee were made voluntary, SA would be forced to venture into uncharted territories of budget allocations.
“In terms of the level of programing I think we would be able to provide to the student body and the level of services that we’d be able to provide would be really diminished,” said Markisello.
It would be near impossible to plan the budget semester-to-semester due to the fact that some students may pay the voluntary fee first semester and then decide not to pay it the next. For this, Markisello explained, the SA has reserve funds put away for unexpected situations like these. There is $ 600,000 in the SA reserve which could be used from anything ranging from a cub that needs money due to lack of funding to radio station WCDB’s broadcast antenna being damaged, explained Engelbride.
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