Newsroom: (541) 346-5511 Room 300, Erb Memorial Union PO. Box 3159, Eugene, OR 97403 E-mail: editor@dailyemerald.com Online Edition: www. dailyemerald .com Monday, March 4,2002 Editor in Chief: Jessica Blanchard Managing Editor: Jeremy Lang Editorial Editor: Julie Lauderbaugh Assistant Editorial Editor: Jacquelyn Lewis Editorial ASUO should grant access to vote count The ASUO Elections Board made a major philosophical error when it barred reporters from witnessing the Feb. 22 primary election vote count. But the ASUO Constitution Court made an equal blunder when it refused to clarify the incident after a grievance was filed. Oregon Commentator publisher Bret Jacobson filed the grievance after the primary election, arguing that the elections board is a public board and the counting would constitute an executive session, for which one representative from each medium is allowed under Oregon law. ASUO rules state that student govern ment must follow applicable state laws, but Jacobson failed to cite this rule in his grievance, and the court dismissed the issue on this technicality. After the vote-counting fiasco in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, the elections board should be trying even harder to ensure free and fair elections. The easiest way to do that is to involve reporters — by nature, the watchdogs of government. The elections board denied media access to campus representatives reportedly because of personal prob lems against specific Commentator staffers. The elections board first granted an Emerald pho tographer access before the tally began, but when he arrived at the ASUO office, he was turned away with the excuse that there was someone representing the Commentator that the elections board didn’t want present, citing that person’s “rude” demeanor. Furthermore, the Emerald and the Commentator were told by representatives of the elections board that media members would only be admitted for the tallying if they could provide applicable state laws or ASUO rules that granted the media access to vote tallies. The elections board has no business denying media access to the tally because of a personality clash or otherwise, and it should be the responsibility of the elections board to know the laws that pertain to the ASUO elections process. The excuse given is flimsy at best and obstructs the common duty of all media members at these events. But the court did not clarify if media members are allowed to be present during vote counting. By throw ing out the grievance, the court simply complicated matters further and let the questions go unanswered. Despite the need for clarification from the court, we maintain that media members have a responsi bility to students to be a watchdog for ASUO pro ceedings. No one should have been denied access during the tally, and it is especially unfair to deny everyone access — when they might normally wel come it — because the elections board dislikes rep resentatives from the Commentator. By circumventing procedure in favor of peace of mind, the ASUO elections board has compromised its integrity in the minds of voters, and the court in turn needs to clarify its position on the issue. Editorial Policy editorial board. Responses can be sent to ietters@dailyemerald.com. Letters to tire editor and guest commentaries are encouraged. Letters are limited to 250 words and guest commentaries to 550 words. Please include contact information. Trie Emerald reserves the right to edit for space, grammar and style. Editorial Board Members Jessica Blanchard editor in chief Jacquelyn Lewis assistant editorial editor managing editor Julie lauderbaugh editorial editor Jerenr lor Golda Portillo community representative Leon Tovey newsroom representative Better than a public school ith an $8 million budget cut looming over the Uni versity, our leaders are frantically scrambling to find solutions. An increased enroll ment figured to be pushing 20,000 means the University will be forced to do more with less. Generic ideas like cutting programs, putting a freeze on new hires and increasing tuition have all been put on the table, but even with these ideas, the University is in a dubious position of always receiving the short end of the stick. The solution is for the Universi ty to go private. There is no ques tion that this school is the beacon of the Oregon University System, but it is at a crossroad. This campus continuous Columnist ly operates with a balanced budget, has found alternative funding sources to expand facilities and recently completed the most successful fund-raising drive in state history. All this is done while other OUS schools keep finding their way into trouble. So while state dollars could be flowing to the University to make it one of the premier schools on the West Coast, this money is going to make other OUS schools nothing more than average. Over in La Grande, anybody can at tend the glorified community college know as Eastern Oregon University for the same in-state rate. During the budg et cuts of the 1980s, there was talk of closing Western Oregon Uni versity in Monmouth and us ing the facilities as a correc tional institution. Yet for some reason these schools and others continue to waste resources that could be best used elsewhere in the Oregon University System, like here. Last year, the OUS set a goal of creating a top-25 engi neering program at Oregon State University, a school that has managed to go $19 million in the red. When a col lege can’t responsibly spend the money it already has, it doesn’t make sense to give it more when the money could be better spent at another institution. Just ask Mike Eyster, who, as the Uni versity’s housing director, pays $1.3 mil lion per year toward a statewide debt pool. University Housing racked up only 17 percent of the pool but pays off 36 percent of it. The difference helped schools like Oregon State University build a new residence hall but prevents the University from doing the same. As a private school, tuition would in crease quite drastically, because it is a simple economic fact that a better prod uct costs more — and a better product is what the University should be striving for. Creating endowments could offset some tuition costs, and the University has already proven that it can raise money by itself. Increased tuition also means that enroll ment would drop off because some stu dents wouldn’t be able to attend the new and improved University of Oregon, but this is fine. As the cost of tuition goes up, so should admission standards. The top universities in the nation are those that have students whose primary purpose is more than just receiving a piece of paper with their name on it at the end. These are also the schools with well-paid professors, modem facilities and hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. In U.S. News and World Report’s most recent rankings of national doctoral universities, two-thirds of the nation’s top 50 schools are private. It is time we make the switch and join them. E-mail columnist Jeff Oliver at jeffoliver@dailyemerald.com. Poll Results: Every week, the Emerald prints the results of our online poll and the poll question for ne