OUR VIEWS Consensus Opinion

The Graduate Student Senate (GSS) finally passed the bill to fund Finding Common Ground Tuesday after losing quorum at their last meeting. Unfortunately, they took out the line item that included funding Maya Angelou, whose keynote speech is central to the event.

It is ridiculous that there is still no funding for Angelou's address less than a week before it happens, and there is still the prospect of the Student Government Association (SGA) failing it again after it returns from conference committee the day before the event. If worse comes to worst, Tech can find alternative sources for funding, but SGA should take the fiscal responsibility for this student activity. The House and Senate should realize that any speaker of Angelou's prominence will be expensive, and the cost is something with which we simply have to deal. Although considering the high expense we would have liked for her to have some student interaction.

Because a small percentage of SGA's membership spearheaded the Finding Common Ground project, most students would assume that SGA would be more than willing to cover a portion of the event. This funding issue has become very public, and while the keynote speaker is supposed to draw attention to Finding Common Ground, a majority of the publicity has been negative. It is almost as if Tech is making a statement that Angelou is not worth the cost, and if we are rude to one of the few high-profile speakers the Institute has been able to host, how will we get others in the future?

GSS and the student body as a whole should have been consulted before a speaker was selected for Finding Common Ground. Pre-planning is key in this type of situation, and Finding Common Ground has been in the works since last semester. If organizers had included more undergraduate and graduate students in the planning, they may not be facing this hurdle.

Perhaps if students were polled beforehand, as they are for events such as Sting Break, GSS might have felt better about funding. We could have learned from last year's Sting Break controversy over the musical performers. Common sense would indicate that student input is vital in making decisions about events for students.

Polling would also provide a means of attracting speakers to campus. If we could provide hard data to potential speakers that indicated how many students were interested in hearing them talk, they would feel it was worth their time to visit Tech.

Talking through these issues much earlier could have saved us from the current headache.