Students stuck in Clemons Library after midnight have a new option for getting home. Student Council’s FreeRide program, officially announced at a meeting last night, offers to pay for any student’s ride home in a Yellow Cab taxi. The project, part of Council’s University Unity Project, will provide a useful service as long as Council has the funds to pay for it. Even if Council manages to fund FreeRide permanently, though, the project does not meet the Unity Project’s goal of involving a large number of students outside of Student Council.
Thanks to corporate sponsorships and funds from the Inter-Fraternity Council and Inter-Sorority Council, FreeRide will be funded at its beginning without Council using any of its own money. Council President Matt Schrimper said he expects that money will run dry sometime next semester, however, and Council will have to dip into money from the student activities fee that went unused by contracted independent organizations last year and rolled over into this year’s budget. Some money is always left over, he said, and Council will depend on it to fund FreeRide in the foreseeable future.
Schrimper understands that arrangement is not sustainable, however. He said Council hopes the University might take over responsibility for the service, as it did with the SafeRide program — originally a Student Council initiative. Council probably should not count on that solution, however, given the budget crisis the University faces. If Council can demonstrate the program is not too costly, surely the University will consider it. Otherwise, Council should look for permanent sources of funding that do not rely on surpluses in Council’s budget. If it cannot find an alternative source of funding, today’s first-year students will graduate with only a distant memory of free cab rides.
The bigger problem with FreeRide, however, is that it does not fit the overall purpose of the Unity Project — engaging a large number of students in action. In a way it does fit the theme of this year’s project; Schrimper said the goal of this year’s project was in part to improve safety for students living off Grounds. Providing free cab rides will do that. Certainly some students will now choose to take a cab rather than walking home, and in that sense they will be safer.
Improving student safety was one goal of this year’s project. The overall goal of the University Unity Project is broader than that, though. The project was supposed to bring as many students as possible together to work toward a single goal. So far, that has not been the case. The FreeRide project will not involve many other students either, since the project essentially consists of Council buying something.
“I still think there is more we can do in terms of making [the University Unity Project] really a unifying project,” Schrimper said. In addition to implementing the several initiatives Council has announced this semester, as well as pursuing the one remaining proposal — free late-night parking in Central Grounds — Schrimper said Council will look to involve more students through greater outreach to CIOs in the spring.
Part of the problem seems to have been that Council did not announce its theme until September, leaving little time for CIOs to plan projects for this semester that might be eligible for Unity Project grants. As a result, the project has mostly been driven by Council initiatives. In the spring, we hope to see that corrected.
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