Finding Voice
ascsu's struggle for representation
by Aaron Hedge
Trevor Trout paced back and forth in the lobby outside a small chamber in the Colorado Legislative Council Library near the Capitol Building in Denver. He mumbled the notes he had prepared for his presentation back to himself. He was nervous. And rightly so. After all, it was the first time in state history a student government would submit a formal proposal to the Joint Budget Committee.
And Trout knew what was at stake. This year, Colorado is in a financial bind, and for the JBC, it’s crunch time. They have to pay attention to and make serious decisions about the lack in funding for the transportation, health care and law enforcement systems under mounting pressure from voters. And they have to figure out a way to close the $830 million gap between Colorado’s higher education funding scheme and the national average. That won’t be easy, and it’ll take a lot of deliberation and time away from the other serious issues plaguing the state.
So how likely are they to listen to four students when they have an entire state population – a pretty red one, largely unaware of the higher education funding crisis – to satisfy?
Katie Gleeson and Dan Palmer joined Trout, the vice president of the Associated Students of CSU, in his apprehension, going through notes and shooting nervous glances into the chamber to make sure none of the lawmakers were showing up early for the presentation.
Gleeson, the president of ASCSU, had to give the introduction for the presentation, telling the committee that the dreams of students at CSU, as well as at institutions across the state, are being killed by extreme hikes in tuition. Palmer, director of Education, had to present statistics supporting Gleeson’s claim. Trout was there to give a personal account of the problem.
August Ritter, though, looked mellow. He was there to ask for a 10 percent tuition cap for CSU, which would mean Colorado students would pay no more than about $240 extra in tuition in the fall, depending on the program cost.
Frustrations with CSU administration?
“You’ve been working really hard this year,” I said to Ritter during the second week of spring classes, whose new position as director of Legislative Affairs at ASCSU requires him to make regular trips to the Capitol representing students to state lawmakers.
“Yeah, I’ve been in Denver like four times a week so far,” he said nonchalantly, like it wasn’t a big deal.
After being largely ignored by administrators, student leaders have found solace in requesting attention for students at the state level this year. Gleeson said the reason they’ve had to work so hard is a difference in opinion over the level of administrative visibility between ASCSU and administration.
“It all came to a head last year with the whole tuition scandal/debacle – whatever you want to call it,” she said.
When the Long Bill, an annual measure that determines the state budget, including tuition increases for state institutions, was being passed by the Joint Budget Committee in March of last year, CSU President Larry Penley introduced a last minute increase in tuition that would have cost students 30 percent more this year. Luckily, then-Director of Legislative Affairs Luke Ragland, who was interning at the Capitol, called the Collegian, and reporters jumped on the story. The hike was then reduced to 16 percent.
But trust was broken with the students. Gleeson said the lack of transparency, cited by student leaders as making their jobs very difficult and “challenging,” has decreased this year, as administrators have made concerted efforts to address student government several times this semester.
But she said they still rarely hear from the top rungs of administration – namely the president’s office.
“My impression is that their philosophy is students don’t need to know everything up front,” she said. “I disagree with that.”
Trout agrees.
“They view our input as something important only after the decision has been made,” he said.
Preparation
I walked up to Ritter in the library chamber as he sat down in his chair and asked him how he was doing.
“Fine,” he said.
As the new director of Legislative Affairs, Ritter is always calm in the presence of politics. He had no problem talking to the JBC, most of whose members he knows on a first-name basis. Growing up as the son of the future governor of Colorado will do that to you.
“What do you think about this whole thing?” he asked me.
Ritter is always trying to get me to participate in ASCSU activities, even though he knows I can’t. I could see another of his ploys was coming.
“I think it’s pretty cool what you guys are doing,” I said, trying to stay objective. I was reporting. I had to have my game face on, even though I had personal appreciation for what the student leaders were doing. I dislike paying astronomical amounts of money for tuition as much as the next student.
“Can I get a copy of what you’re gonna say?” I said, to change the direction of the conversation.
“Yeah, man,” he said, handing over a crumpled sheet of text that had several splotches of dried ketchup on it. “Sorry it’s a little messy,” he said. “We had lunch just before.”
“That’s cool,” I said. After all, we were all college students, and all, to some extent, in this together.
The four student leaders had skipped class for the day because they had felt a responsibility to represent students. And they were doing it at the state level. This wasn’t just a 10-minute walk from the Lory Student Center to Penley’s office in the Administration Building. This was bigger than that. And these four students had been doing it all semester.
The JBC
After the six-member JBC heard the proposal, they told ASCSU that they would love nothing more than to approve it, no questions asked. But they couldn’t just do it of their own volition; first, Colorado voters would need some convincing.
Sen. Steve Johnson, R- Fort Collins, expressed hesitance to approve the request due to limited budget funds, thanks to TABOR and Amendment 23’s ratcheting effect.”
The JBC has its hands tied by a decade of restrictive voter initiatives and Colorado citizens’ lack of awareness of college student interests. The committee willing to pay attention, but no one else is.
Gleeson
Katie Gleeson knows what she wants: better opportunities for students. She meets regularly with Senior Vice Provost Tony Frank and a slew of other university officials to voice the student interest. Sometimes they don’t listen to her.
When administration met the CSU System Board of Governors at the end of the fall semester, they discussed a proposal in executive session from media giant Gannett regarding a possible sale of the Collegian. As president of ASCSU, Gleeson can’t by state law disclose any topics of conversation brought up during executive session. During the closed discussion of the proposal, she demanded to administration and the BOG that any further talks be open to Student Media and the student body.
But Penley invited Gleeson to a closed-door meeting on the first day of spring classes with Bob Moore and Christine Chin, executive editor and publisher, respectively, of the Fort Collins Coloradoan – a Gannet-owned paper – to discuss what they called at the time a “strategic partnership.”
No Student Media representative, member of the student body or administration knew about the meeting. The Collegian got an anonymous tip about the meeting one hour before it started. Reporters and editors called all their friends and rushed to Penley’s office with signs to picket against the buy-out.
J. David McSwane, editor-in-chief of the Collegian, ran into the lobby outside the administrative offices just as Gleeson, Penley, Moore and Chin were entering and demanded to be in the meeting.
Torn over her situation, Gleeson knew the meeting, which she had protested against a month before, was busted, and the Collegian crew could see she was on the verge of tears.
As the ASCSU president, Gleeson is where the buck stops for student representation with CSU. She is privy to information in administrative offices that no other students have access to but by word of mouth.
She later told McSwane and me in a meeting with Blanche Hughes and Anne Hudgens, the respective director and vice president of Student Affairs, about her angst at not being able to articulate the proposal to students after the de facto shushing via executive session.
“I’ve said over and over again how conflicted I was knowing all this information and not being able to voice it to the constituency I felt most needed to know,” she said in an interview two months after it happened.
“I made my point to the president that this was putting me in a very awkward position. I do represent the students, and I couldn’t represent them well without having to share my information with the rest of the student body. It puts me in a very awkward spot sometimes and it’s very frustrating. … I do get frustrated at times when I’m wondering, ‘Is there something they’re (the administration) not telling me?’”
After all, if she can’t talk to students, how can she adequately represent them?
The Athletics debacle
As I looked over the forty-page all-programs report for student fee requests that Trout handed me after the initial proposal meeting with the Student Fee Review Board, I didn’t notice anything really worth chasing at first. The biggest increase request came from Hartshorn Health Center – about five percent for hiring a new psychiatrist. No big deal.
But on second glance, I noticed the Athletics Department slot was empty.
Athletics, a program that almost invariably requests increases, wasn’t asking for more money. And yet the financially starving department, which struggles, too, with athletic success, needs about $2.5 million extra to function next year.
The department just signed Steve Fairchild on as the new head coach for the football team, under a contract that marks him – at $700,000 a year – as the third-highest-paid coach in the Mountain West Conference. Not to mention the nearly $1 million it still owes former head coach Sonny Lubick after forcing him out of his position last semester. The revamp of the Athletics Department also includes several new salary schemes and coaching positions.
It was February when I received the report, the athletics season was almost over, and a scant number of wins was all the major teams could boast.
I was expecting to see a heavy proposal from Athletics.
So I called Paul Kowalczyk, director of the program, and asked why there wasn’t a request.
“We didn’t want to put a heavier financial burden on students,” he said, along with something about having a surplus from increases in previous years.
Pretending to take it at face value, I said, “That’s all I need. Thanks for your time.” And hung up the phone.
Trout
Nearly two months later, I was sitting in the newsroom trying to get my stories together for the next day’s Collegian, and I got a text from a seat on the SFRB saying, “Athletics is submitting a late and very large fee increase for next year.”
I rolled my eyes and texted back, “Right now?”
“We are discussing it right now. Trevor just told us,” came the reply.
So I rushed to the SFRB meeting in the Lory Student Center and arrived just as they were wrapping up their initial discussion.
After, I asked Trout about the increase, and he said, “I’m wondering if you will help me write an article about how frustrated I am for next week.”
Trout’s frustrations would have to wait.
I had the increase article in the Collegian the next day.
“This is interesting because it was all prior to the Joint Budget Committee’s 9.5 percent cap on tuition,” he later said in an interview about the Athletics Department not requesting a fee.
The JBC implemented the cap the day before Trout heard about the increase. Before that day, he was under the impression from talks with Tony Frank, the senior vice provost, that Athletics would get an increase from the central fund – increasing tuition instead of fees. But with the tuition cap, how would administration raise the extra money? Either way, they would have to fund a series of expensive coach buyouts, the most recent being women’s basketball head coach Jen Warden’s firing at the end of May. CSU still owes Warden $230,000.
“It didn’t leave a good taste in students’ mouths,” Trout said.
Ritter
August Ritter doesn’t like seeing his name published. He thinks it makes him look like an attention seeker. That’s why he was very selective about the questions he answered when I interviewed him last semester about becoming the new director of Legislative Affairs for ASCSU.
He knows how journalists think. Growing up in a political family gives you an edge when it comes to talking to the media. And it was the first time I’d met him.
As director, it was, all of a sudden, his responsibility to convey the student interest to state lawmakers, including the governor – his dad.
So it was understandable that he was wary.
“Hey, man, when I was talking to you about my experience on my dad’s campaign, I didn’t want to sound like I was bragging,” he said over the phone after the interview. He had called me to make sure I wasn’t taking anything out of context for the article, which would run in the Collegian the next day. He didn’t want people to have any misconceptions about his motives.
He is a global tourism major and wants to start a travel agency in Western Europe. And has no particular interest in politics.
But at CSU, he just wants to help students.
You can tell that he cares about education in Colorado every time he stands up in front of the JBC, the entire House of Representatives or just the everyday Joe off the street and tells them, with conviction, why college students’ wellbeing matters.
“I really appreciate you doing this story, man,” he told me one day at the Capitol when I mentioned I was running a story on the actions he and his counterparts take to represent CSU. “I don’t think a lot of students know how hard we work.”
Ritter is a politician, no matter how much he avoids being tagged as one.
He is constantly followed by a rag-tag band of students, some of them regulars, some of them first-and-only timers.
One day, after a crash course in lobbying state lawmakers, four students followed Ritter into the lobby of The House of Representatives to pull legislators to gain their support for legislation that will help students.
In 30 minutes, they had pulled three politicians out of the House of Representatives to give statistics and personal accounts showing why the student interest matters. Bernie Buescher, D-Grand Junction, was receptive to their request. But Cheri Jahn, D-Wheat Ridge, a huge advocate of non-traditional education, wanted to know more specifics before she committed her support.
It’s not easy to convince politicians to support you, especially in Colorado, Max Clark said.
“There’s so many things people want, and everyone can’t have everything,” the senior international relations major said after talking to Buescher.
The uphill battle
Representatives from ASCSU have spent countless hours in Denver this semester, schmoozing politicians who will implement laws to help students. And it works. The Long Bill for fiscal year 2009 includes a 9.5 percent tuition cap at the end of March. Textbook transparency legislation drafted by a CSU student passed the House of Representatives in mid-March.
Things are looking up for students around the state thanks to days spent by ASCSU and other student governments.
And Gleeson says administration is giving the students more attention. Frank, she said, is always available.
Johnson commended Gleeson, Trout, the younger Ritter and Palmer after they showed up to present their proposal that February day at the Capitol.
“When I was involved with ASCSU, we didn’t do nearly as much as you do,” he told them. “Keep it up.”
But with new representation on the docket for next year’s ASCSU cabinet, it’s still up in the air whether the new presidential cabinet (unknown at the time this article was drafted) will act under the same philosophy. Each of the four tickets promises, if elected, to work closely with administration to improve transparency and budget management.
“We’re the best student government in Colorado,” said Sen. Taylor Smoot, an ASCSU presidential hopeful at the first informal debate at the end of March between the candidates. “Our ticket wants to maintain that status.”
But some students are skeptical.
“It sounds like they’re all just talking, saying the same thing,” an observer of debate told me before longboarding off to class.
Whoever the new leaders are, they have their work cut out for them. Indeed, student governments from across the state still have their work cut out for them. As a case in point, Colorado slipped to the bottom of the barrel this year for higher education funding in the nation.
And Referendum C is slated to expire in 2010,
which allowed lawmakers to regain control of taxes to fund programs, including higher education, after the 2001 recession – and probably will without a huge surge in support from Colorado’s apathetic voters, state lawmakers say.
Sen. Johnson calls the state budget a “spider web.”
Political science professor John Straayer says the only way to fix the problem is to go to the voters for permission to implement a one-year exemption to Colorado’s single-subject rule, which dictates that a Constitutional amendment can only deal with one issue. The exemption would allow state lawmakers to draft an amendment that would comprehensively fix all of the restrictions Colorado’s budgetary pickle places on state funding.
Now it’s up to students to mend the rift in higher education funding, improve transparency in state institutions and restore a priority that puts student first – all despite the abrasive ignorance of Colorado voters. And they’ll have to do it at the state level.