The Undergraduate Council of Students will vote next week on a proposal to formally oppose the federal sequester, said UCS Treasurer Sam Gilman ’15.
The sequester — which was announced by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — would cut six percent of federal student aid for millions of students, Gilman said at the UCS meeting Wednesday night.
The council should take a stand against the sequester, Gilman said, adding that he has drafted a resolution he will invite members to review. He asked the council to vote on the resolution at its meeting next week.
Looking forward, UCS should send the resolution to other schools and “try to get them on board,” Gilman said.
The federal sequester’s negative impact on students has not received adequate attention, Gilman added. “They haven’t gotten any press on this,” he said. “No one’s talking about the effect on students.”
Gregory Chatzinoff ’15, parliamentarian and UCS-UFB liaison, said he wondered whether the council’s formal opposition to the federal sequester would mark the first time the council has “taken a partisan side on a political issue.”
Gilman said the issue of the federal sequester could not be divided along partisan lines.
The council also approved recategorizing 12 Category III groups that had not been spending their baseline funding. These groups included Brown EMTs, BrownNation and Latin American Student Organization.
The group leaders did not respond in time to emails notifying them of their impending decategorization, so “there is no way they can appeal” the decision, said Student Activities Chair Alexander Kaplan ’14. “If it was that important to them, they would have responded,” Kaplan said.
“It’s not like they’re not going to be groups anymore,” said Afia Kwakwa ’14, chair of the Campus Life Committee. “They’re just going down to Category II. They don’t need the money.”
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