?Dear Editor
Two weeks ago graduate students voted to maintain the GSA mandatory fee and to increase it by 20%. We voted in favor of that bad word: tax.
The federal and state budget "crises" hinge on that prohibited word: mutilate the body of social spending with budget cuts, and break the collective bargaining rights of public unions on the premise that "we're broke," but don't dare speak of a new tax. A tax: a try, an effort, not a punishment. Politics is a matter of aesthetics, of word play.
Taxing. This is taxing. This fee is taxing. To pay this fee will be taxing. If the subject of "to tax" is an object (‘this'), the result of the taxing is a goal achieved. If the subject of "to tax" is a subject (‘they'), the result of the taxing is punitive, the Other's punishment, not the other's benefit. This is realistic, if fallacious.
There are almost half a million students in the SUNY system. As students, we play a very important role in society, we should be idealists and advocate for more than the "realistic." Global warming is realistic. Increased tuition is realistic. Increased income disparity is realistic.
Because of the fee increase, GSA will be offering ~39% more Mark Diamond Research Fund grants. MDRF Director Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa ápi is collaboratively designing a new application for funding thesis/dissertation work in the Humanities. This application will complement the existing application which caters to scientific research. GSA is expanding both the scope and scale of services and funds available to graduate students. With the fee increase there is a clear and transparent benefit to graduate students. Clear and Transparent. GSA Treasurer Jon Knights and Programming Coordinator Stephen Krysty deserve praise for their clear and thorough explanation of the benefits incurred by voting in favor of the increase. Jon Knights has consistently proven a dedication to openness and clarity, he proves that bureaucracy is not always pejoratively opaque.
SUNY at Buffalo Student Association executive board; President Nischal Vasant, VP Shervin Stoney and Treasurer Antonio Roman and SA's staff have proven this past year that student government can be both fun and serious. They exercised professionalism in working with The Spectrum and GSA as a community of scholars and proved that student government isn't simply an extracurricular activity: it is the curricular in practice.
President-Elect and current VP Grace Mukupa, as Chair of the GSA's Funding and Employment Committee, worked with graduate students to learn more about the international student fee increase. She has already done excellent work at building communication between SUNYAB student governments and encouraged dialogue between graduate students and SUNYAB's administration.
What is learned through practice? That the unrealistic is possible.
We are being given two options. It's either tuition roulette or rational tuition. How about free tuition? Is free tuition realistic? No. It is idealistic, but not impossible.
It might seem that applauding an increase in a specific fee while challenging the either/or rhetoric around tuition increases is contradictory; that somehow advocating this particular cause forecloses on the right to challenge rhetorical binaries. These segments do not match, however, their ratios are off, they teem outward and multiply. In order to think at all, we have to allow contradictions to produce other possibilities.
Actuate the content of the classroom on the form of the classroom, and extend the form of the classroom to the form of the university. Studying freedom or studying aesthetics needs to coordinate with a third way, idealism, to offer a possibly impossible answer to stuck meaning.
Democracy is not a static object and neither is a University. The brave efforts of students struggling for democracy, specifically in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, should not be lost in translation. Practice Democracy in the University.
Students are the future. That means infinitely more than blue Helvetica printed on a white banner.
Olivier Delrieu-Schulze
President, SUNY at Buffalo Graduate Student Association
and
Scott Ries
SUNY at Buffalo Graduate Student
Letters to the editor are not edited by The Spectrum.
