Op-Ed: Matt Moehr
Activist Matt Moehr was published in Thursday’s Badger Herald, voicing his opposition to the proposed Natatorium renovations. Matt’s piece is copied below.
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Students should vote “No” on the proposed Natatorium renovation April 12-14. A referendum on the spring ASM elections will ask students to raise segregated fees another 10 percent to pay back a $60 million bond issue to upgrade the Nat in 2014. That is $108 per year for 30 years. I think this is a poor use of segregated fees.
Students are already handing over more than $1000 per year in seg fees, including $220 to pay off loans for Union South and the Student Activity Center. Renovating the Nat with seg fees will set a negative precedent for jacking up fees whenever someone wants a new building.
Think about it: state policy makers and UW administration love it when we charge ourselves money and upgrade the campus. Tuition costs have gone up 88 percent since 2002, and prospective students are going to be more and more resistant to paying higher tuition. To recruit students, UW-Madison must walk a fine line. The state Legislature and Chancellor Biddy Martin don’t want to raise tuition, but they want to have shiny new buildings to show off during new student recruitment. And seg fees are their perfect answer: all the shiny buildings and no tuition hikes!
The problem is, increased seg fees are essentially a backdoor tuition hike. Four years ago it was SAC, two years ago it was Union South, this year it is the Nat, next year who knows? we might want a dedicated hockey arena or a new performing arts center. None of these projects are bad ideas, mind you, but buildings should never be financed from student segregated fees. Almost all of the $981 million spent for 41 building and renovation projects since 2005 have spared students.
There are always going to be motivated students, for example the NatUp group, who will want to take “just a little bit more” from our pockets. The problem is that the opposition to raising seg fees is dispersed and not organized around any particular issue. Maybe the backers of raising seg fees have finally made too many people mad because there are now groups organizing around a campaign of No New Seg Fees (www.nonewsegfees.org)
I, for one, will be voting “No.”
Let’s put a stop to the trend of using segregated fees for campus building projects. On April 12 I think all students should vote “No,” regardless of how they feel about the Nat, because we need the administration and state government to make a real commitment to high-quality, affordable education here at UW-Madison. And we need them to stop swiping money out of our pockets for their shiny new recruitment tools.
Matthew J. Moehr
Department of Sociology
mmoehr@ssc.wisc.edu