Playground politics, personal vendettas, uninformed decisions=your Student Association.

The Student Association proved Thursday it can make good decisions and bad ones.

Three SA members who are on the President’s Fee Study Committee voted to boot the athletic fee increase recommendation. The fourth member, SA President Paul Middleton abstained from the vote. It’s interesting that he abstained from the vote. Could it be that he was in cahoots with the administration and promised to support the fee increase? It’s sad that Middleton cannot even follow what the senate asked him to do. As a representative of the senate and students alike, Middleton should not have even had a second thought where his loyalties lie or which way to vote.

The SA members of the committee also voted to zero fund The Northern Star. The reasons given not to fund the Star were oblivious, obscure and unfounded at best. Based on conversations with SA members, the four SA members and one graduate student made their decision because of one conversation between the Star adviser and an SA senator. If that is how these four, who are supposedly representing students, make their decisions, NIU is in big trouble. Their sandbox politicking is costing more to students than a paper, it is costing the students their voice.

The four obviously have no clue how the Star runs, nor did they bother to find out. An adviser is just that. It is the students that run the paper and make the decisions. There is no question about where the power lies in the Star_it lies with the students.

Funny how this pull of funding comes at a time when the SA was pressured by the editorial board to not support the athletic fee. The SA always claims to act like a real government and it has proved this by its ignorance and corruption. They should be proud of themselves. How is that these five students can make a choice for the entire student body? Did they discuss it at a senate meeting and take a vote from all the senators? No. Did they devote the same amount of time to the Star as they did the athletic fee? No. These SA members made a decision for students based on their personal feelings and sore egos over being caught with their pants down.

The function of this paper is simple, it is the watchdog of the NIU community. This includes the administration and the student government. It is highly doubtful that the athletic fee increase ever would have become an issue without this paper. Students would have simply learned about the fee increase when their bills came.

SA Treasurer Tony Lopykinski claims that non-profit organizations cannot afford the Star’s advertising rates. The fact is that non-profit organizations get a clear break from what other advertisers pay. It seems a little counterproductive to cut the Star’s funding so that it will then have to raise the advertising rates to make up for the money lost. How will they afford advertising then? The Star operates below cost for its nonprofit advertising. To produce one column inch in the paper costs $6.04. Non-profit organizations pay $6 to place one column inch of advertising. No other area paper offers advertising rates as low as the Star and that is a fact, pure and simple.

It is a newspaper’s duty to report the news_good or bad about any organization and this includes the student government, the university’s administration or whoever has an effect on the paper’s community. The news is not created, it is watched and reported on. Without this paper, the administration and the SA will run without checks. The choice should be left to the ones who matter, the students.

The SA should grow up.