The trustees did not vote the fee down, but they did not include it in their list of recommended fees, so no fee will be in effect for the 2017-18 school year.
Douglas Shackelford, dean of the business school, said while the proposal they made to the Board of Trustees had already been amended based on feedback from lower committees, he does not know when the University could expect a decision to be made regarding the proposal.
“From our perspective, it’s out of our hands,” Shackelford said. “We’ve made our proposal and it’s gone to the chancellor and the provost and no decision has been made right now. The proposal hasn’t been approved or denied; it’s kind of in category three right now.”
The trustees’ lack of a recommendation follows objections from lower committees that heard the fee this fall.
“The Student Fee Audit Committee recommended against (the business school’s proposals) a couple of times and have stuck with that recommendation,” Harry Edwards, student body treasurer and chairperson of the the committee, said. “We raised a number of concerns to the specific proposals.”
Edwards said the amended proposal the business school presented in the meeting with the Board of Trustees on Wednesday addressed many of the concerns his committee had with the initial proposal presented earlier in the year, but it still did not address the concerns about diversity.
“After we heard the first proposal and had issues with it, we went through in great detail and issued recommendations for what we’d want to see,” he said. “Included in that was a diversity plan included in that — a suggestion that the fee level be reduced. But essentially the whole idea then, a couple months ago, was that they can come back with a reduced proposal.”
