By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 21, 2012
Do you want to pay an extra $72 a semester? Somehow, I don’t think so. Doesn’t matter. By the time you read this, it’s probably too late; you’re going to have to.
It’s hard, as a student, to keep up with everything that’s going on at UFV. There are a million things that I wish I had time for. Trying to fit everything in is a monumental task – it’s hard enough to keep up with this week’s reading, let alone politics. Given how little time students have to spare, I can’t find it in me to be surprised that so few students pay attention to the my.ufv sidebar pleading us all to vote in some election or another. Senate? Board of governors? SUS? Referendums? Who has the time to even begin to be informed about this stuff?
Trust me, I once counted myself foremost among the forces of voter apathy. I’m well acquainted with the excuses we tell ourselves to try and feel better about not being informed. It’s easy to convince ourselves that one measly little vote won’t matter in the long run. “I don’t really know what’s going on!” you might mewl, “I just didn’t have the time to get to know the candidates/issue!”
Well, UFV students, I’m here to tell you that you have more than likely dropped the ball on this one.
I’m talking about the athletics referendum, which, unless you read this issue in the first twelve hours after its printing, you are too late to vote in. How many of you even knew there was a referendum going on, let alone what it was about?
In your own defence, it wasn’t very well advertised. I would wager this is on purpose. The athletics department has more than enough students to pass it by themselves, whether or not any other students vote – so, naturally, as they have the most to gain from it, there haven’t been any posters, major advertisements, or reminder emails to the rest of the student body. It ran from March 19 to 21, and if it has passed, each UFV student will pay the equivalent of three per cent of their tuition. For a full-time student, based on four upper-level classes, that’s somewhere in the region of an additional $72 every semester.
I’ll repeat myself: do you want to pay an extra $72 a semester? I’m pretty sure you don’t. But did you care enough to vote? Somehow, I don’t think so. This is the direct result of voter apathy. As I write this, the votes haven’t even begun yet. But given the short voting period (thanks, again, to the athletics department) and the nearly complete lack of awareness, I have little to no hope that the referendum will be defeated.
Last semester, CIVL wanted an extra $4 from each student – and we were more than willing to scream about that. You know why? Aaron Levy, the guy keeping CIVL running, did UFV the service of raising awareness himself: he, and a group of other volunteers, went around to classrooms to spread information. They were completely above-ground with what they wanted and why; they gave every student a chance to develop an opinion on what was going on. Inevitably, some students disagreed with that particular referendum; in this particular case, the informed student body, as a result, voted the CIVL referendum down.
Athletics, in contrast, has kept this on the down-low, and as a result I am absolutely sure they’ll get their 72 bucks a semester out of each of us. That equals out to over three quarters of a million dollars a year. And we don’t even know what they’re going to do with it: the budget they’ve presented is maddeningly vague and keeps changing.
And you haven’t even heard the best part: since the fee is a percentage rather than a set amount, if the cost of tuition rises, so does the fee. Not only are they dipping into your wallet now, but they’re making sure they’ll be able to dip into it in the future.
Like I said, despite the fact that, as I write this, the vote doesn’t open for another two days, I am almost absolutely certain that this referendum will pass. I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it, but I don’t think it’ll be enough. The Cascade ran an article about it last week; I;ve been posting about it incessantly on facebook.; I’m writing this article to our future selves right now.
But no matter how wrong I think this referendum is, I am only one person. I’m going to get as many of you to vote as I can – but I still don’t think it’s enough, and as you read this, it will probably already have passed. Sure, I’m being pessimistic – but I think deservedly so. I would love nothing better than to run this article and be told after its publication how very wrong I was. But I truly think voter apathy will get the better of us; maybe now, $72 poorer every semester, we’ll learn the painful lesson.
