By Matthew Boyle | mboyle@flagler.edu
It’s 6:16 on a Monday night and Chuck Riffenburg is talking on his cell phone on the front steps of the Proctor Library.
Unlike other students, though, Riffenburg is talking business. Even though he finally got the Flagler College administration to approve his Hunger Initiative project, he still has to do all the legwork.
Riffenburg’s Hunger Initiative is a rarity at Flagler in that it’s actually getting done. Other student-proposed projects die early and die often. They barely ever make it past all the administrative roadblocks, for better or for worse.
Student Government Association President David Matulewicz thinks the administration suppresses student-proposed projects.
“We don’t have any ability to actually do anything,” he said. “Someone can veto [a project] at every level of it [the approval process]. When you have four, five or six layers of veto power, how is anything supposed to be done?”
Riffenburg said a combination of determination, having the right motives and “divine providence” helped him moving.
Riffenburg has the determination. As for his motives, he doesn’t want a basic resume plug. Instead, he said he knows it’s the right thing to do. As for the “divine providence” factor, Riffenburg said all the pieces fell together for the project and it feels like it was meant to be.
Riffenburg spends several hours a day working on the Hunger Initiative project and has since he proposed it midway through last semester. He puts about the amount of work a full-time job requires.
“It’s so difficult because there’s so many different parties involved,” Riffenburg said. “You have to bring everyone in before you can make anything concrete.”
Matulewicz thinks all the bureaucratic nightmare students have to go through to get anything done boils down to one thing: the Flagler College administration lacks respect for its students.
“Maybe if we were sheep, this would be a wonderful shepherd of a college,” Matulewicz said. “But I’m not a sheep.”
He’s right. Flagler’s bigwigs need to let students make their own choices and either screw up or succeed.
Stetson University of DeLand, Fla., a small private institution with roughly the same size student body as Flagler, allows its student government to disburse all student funds. If Flagler allowed our SGA to distribute student organization funds, you might actually be able to get something done.
Stetson’s SGA President Akeel St. Jean said his internal SGA budget is $28,000, almost three times more than Flagler’s entire SGA budget of about $10,000, internal and external. St. Jean said Stetson’s SGA has a “significantly higher” budget for distribution to non-SGA student organizations.
Why doesn’t Flagler’s administration allow our SGA to distribute student funds?
“There’s a handful of people at this school who just feel that students cannot be responsible for their own education,” Matulewicz said. “There are people in key positions who don’t care about students.”
Stetson also allows its SGA to make decisions and change laws.
“The student government [at Stetson] weighs in and has a vote on new faculty,” Matulewicz said. “The student government [at Stetson] can vote to change rules.”
Matulewicz said that he couldn’t put together a relief fundraiser for the earthquake victims in Haiti because, once again, of the bureaucratic nightmare that would’ve been a roadblock in front of him.
The answer to all Flagler’s power problems is simple: give students the power to make choices, start programs and projects and disburse all student organizations’ funding.
The end result is a win-win for Flagler’s administration, too.
If it works, administrators look great and can claim the success as their own. If it doesn’t, shift back to the way it is now and blame all the problems on the sheep.
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