By
The Wildcat Opinions Board
On Thursday, the Arizona state Senate threw us a bone.
It approved the appointment of two students who will sit on the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR), the all-powerful board that controls higher education in the state of Arizona.
But in this case, two is not really better than one.
Only one of these student regents has the power to vote. The other merely serves as an "apprentice" for the first year of his term before moving into the second-year voting position.
This new "apprenticeship" policy, approved by the state legislature last year, pretends to give students more representation without really doing so.
Matt Meaker, a UA law student and former Residence Hall Association president, was appointed by Gov. Jane D. Hull to serve in the apprentice position this fall.
The state senate approved his appointment on Thursday.
Good for him, bad for us.
Instead of giving college students - and specifically our university - a direct voice with the ability to represent students when it comes time to say "yes" or "no," the state gave them an apprentice.
To be fair to the thousands of students in Arizona, the state should grant students two voting representatives.
The logic behind the apprenticeship plan is that student regents can use their first year to "learn the ropes."
Apparently a coherent, intelligent college student like Meaker - who is affected daily by the decisions made by ABOR - needs more training than one of the many businesspeople or attorneys that currently sit on the board.
Imagine if they did this in the senate or city council. When officials are elected, the state will first give them a year-long test to make sure they know what they are doing. Yeah, right.
ABOR is inbalanced. President Don Ulrich and president-elect Kay McKay are both executives who serve on numerous boards. While both bring experience to ABOR, they are not members of the college community.
ABOR boasts only one voting student - one sole voice, who is supposed to represent all 101,000 college students in the state. Mary Echeverria, an ASU economics senior, is the current student regent.
Clearly, ABOR needs to be restructured so that it will fairly represent student interests. The current system is like taxation without representation. Arizona students pay for their college education, yet the decision-making body that controls much of it does not have enough voting members who can directly represent the students.
A progressive action that would actually start to give Arizona students the representation they deserve would be for the state to allow two student regents - both with the power to vote - to serve on ABOR simultaneously.
Thanks for the apprenticeship. But students need another vote.
