No club funding for you
College students trying to live on tight budgets know the key to financial solvency is planning ahead. Too bad nobody told the members of Associated Students of the University of Arizona Senate and Appropriations Board: They ran through their club-funding budget long before the year was up. That means student organizations will have to look elsewhere for support for events in the next two months. Senate minutes indicate the group saw this coming as far back as October but failed to correct course in time to save club funding. For lack of long-term planning, the ASUA Senate and Appropriations Board get a fail.
Work study done right
Not all legislation coming out of Phoenix recently has been about banning books and egg sales or funding private colleges. HB 2626, passed in the House last week, would tap the state’s general fund for $5 million and double it with contributions from private companies to create a $10 million work-study program aimed at keeping students in Arizona after they graduate. The bill’s chief sponsor said he began working on the legislation after becoming disgusted that undergraduates were paying expenses increasingly with student loans rather than aid. For intelligently using state and private resources in the fight against graduate brain drain in Arizona – and for being the antithesis of the misbegotten private college scholarship fund -ÿthe fledgling work-study bill gets a pass.
SAPR getting dapper
The Registrar’s Office, Enrollment Management and CCIT have worked together to create a new version of the Student Academic Progress Report, which they unveiled this week. There’s no denying the old SAPR was in need of a makeover. The new SAPR comes outfitted with some highly touted bells and whistles like colored headers indicating whether or not a student has completed a section and pluses and minuses to signify status on individual requirements. However, it’s still easy to get lost in the text-based format, and most students still find their SAPRs full of errors. Though these changes represent a step in the right direction, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. The new SAPR gets an incomplete.ÿÿ
Clear-eyed scientists
It seems that UA astronomers and optical scientists are in the news every other week. Whether the publicity is for building the HiRISE camera currently orbiting Mars or for developing new optical devices to better spy distant planets, it is uniformly positive and free of the complaints of waste, fraud and rancor that occasionally spring from other departments and bodies on campus. When the worst that can be said about a program concerns the new Optical Sciences building’s ostentatious copper facade, it’s time to give both the astronomy and optical sciences programs a pass.
Opinions Board
Opinions are determined by the Wildcat opinions board and written by one of its members. They are Nina Conrad, Lori Foley, Caitlin Hall, Michael Huston, Ryan Johnson, Aaron Mackey and Tim Runestad.
