MSU Student Government Plans to Hold Banquet with Luxurious Prizes
Updated: Oct 14, 2020
Author: Sergei Kelley
On April 13, a Michigan State University student government will be awarding themselves high priced items at their “Love and Unity” banquet, hosted by the MSU Residence Hall Association (RHA).
The MSU RHA currently holds $6,000 in their budget for the banquet hoping to “express support, kindness, room for growth, diversity, and of course, love and unity.”
The RHA is the student government for the campus dormitories, which means students pay a tax to fund them. For Spring 2019, the RHA had over $736,000 in funds for their executive board and general assembly to allocate, according to their budget.
The general assembly of RHA includes four committees on budget, diversity and resident advocacy, internal affairs, and programming.
The “Love and Unity” banquet is free for attendees, but not all students are eligible. 5 members of each club can attend, according to the Communications Officer of RHA. This is recorded within meeting minutes from RHA’s general assembly meeting on March 13.
An interesting feature to this banquet are prizes that will be handed out. These include, “a tv, Go Pros, [and] Airpods.” It is unclear how attendees will win these prizes.
The Morning Watch spoke with MSU students who are critical of this event.
“It is a terrible use of student tax dollars. It's one thing to have a banquet, which most clubs do have, but it’s another to be giving out expensive gifts to the insiders of the organization,” said Adam Majestic a junior studying Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy.
Majestic said the idea of promoting love and unity was good, but he “would scrap the free gifts or convert the gifts into an open, public raffle that any RHA taxpayer can participate in.”
Matthew Daugherty, a senior studying Supply Chain Management also questioned their spending.
“That is really not smart. Those prizes are far too expensive. I’m not surprised though … governments in general are horrific when it comes to spending their money,” Daugherty said.
Contributor: Sergei Kelley