Committee votes on Athletic fee

The debate over the Athletic fee is finally over now that the Mandatory Student Fee Advisory Committee (MSFAC) has voted to support the first option to raise the Athletic fee by 112 dollars per year.

The second option, which entailed raising the fee by 24 dollars per semester and charging 100 dollars for tickets for home football and ACC basketball games, was the first option voted on by the committee due to a motion made on the floor of the committee. The second option received a vote of two in favor, nine opposed and one abstention, so the option failed the committee.

The first option was voted on next and received a vote of nine in favor and three opposed. The option passed the committee and the committee will give Institute President Wayne Clough a formal recommendation to submit the first option to the Board of Regents. The three opposed, however, were the three graduate students on the committee.

"I am disappointed that today the Mandatory Student Fee Advisory Committee voted to recommend that President Clough ask the Board of Regents to raise the mandatory Athletic Fee by 75 percent to 112 dollars per year," said Mitch Keller, graduate student body president.

According to Keller, the three graduate student members of the committee voted against this recommendation because they did not feel it was the right solution.

"I appreciate that the Athletic Association has found itself in a difficult financial situation and that something has to be done to remedy that. However, I feel that the alternative proposal to raise the fee by half the amount, to 88 dollars per semester, along with charging for student tickets to football and men's basketball games, provided a much fairer solution to all Tech students," Keller said.

According to Keller, it would have increased the support provided by the student body as a whole to the Athletic Association (AA) while simultaneously asking those who derive the most benefit from our athletic programs to provide a larger amount of financial support for those programs.

"This is a model that is successful at a number of other institutions, and I have little doubt that it would have been successful here as well, once students got past their initial shock of a change in the status quo."

"I appreciate the efforts that the administration, led on this front by Clough and Charles Liotta, vice provost for research and dean of Graduate Studies, has made to lessen the impact of this fee increase on our graduate teaching and research assistants," Keller said.

According to Keller, they have responded swiftly to study the much larger issue of graduate student stipends, including, among other things, a target of providing additional funding to Graduate Teaching Assistants and Graduate Research Assistants to offset the increased amount we must pay for the privilege of attending and working at Tech.

"We look forward to working with the administration to see these efforts through so that Tech can continue to attract top graduate students in spite of this dramatic increase in mandatory student fees.

"Unfortunately, this additional assistance will not help our graduate students who do not have assistantships, nor will it change the fact that a Ga. resident undergraduate student will face an increase of nearly two percent in their cost of attending Tech next year in order to support athletics," Keller said.

The undergraduates, on the other hand, were in support of the first option. The five undergraduate members of the committee voted for the first option.

"We got lots of feedback. Hundreds of people expressed their opinion about the Athletic fee and almost all of them were in favor of Option I," said Alison Graab, undergraduate student body president. The Undergraduate House of Representatives passed a resolution expressing their support for the first option.