“To use a classic quote, "What we have here… is a failure to communicate."

Regent Tom Shields can't reach out to the students. It's his lack of commitment to doing his job correctly that has caused the voice of the students to fall on deaf ears. It seems as if he's lost touch with the students and forgotten why he was put in his position: to give us another voice on the Board of Regents.

Mr. Shields is a student at UW-Oshkosh, where he served as the Oshkosh Student Association's Vice President and Vice President Pro Tempore. The United Council of UW Students fought hard to have a second student member on the Board of Regents, and so Mr. Shields was appointed in May 2006. However, due to partisan issues, his seat was not official until January 2007. He currently serves on the Business, Finance, and Audit Committee as well as the Committee on Student Discipline and Other Student Appeals.

First, Mr. Shields' attendance record since his seat was confirmed at the beginning of this year is spotty at best. He missed a third of the monthly regents meetings between February and July, according to the minutes of those meetings from the Board of Regents office, and for some of the meetings where he was counted as present, he was tardy. His attendance has become more regular since July, but perhaps not at the right moments. Mr. Shields is also a member of the Segregated Fee Policy Review Committee, which was formed to create a new policy for how to handle student-segregated fees. He was absent from that committee's last meeting.

What is most concerning about Mr. Shields' performance is not just his inability to show up at key meetings, but how he conducts himself at the meetings he does attend. I attended the Segregated Fee Policy Review Committee on Oct. 16 at UW-Stevens Point and Mr. Shields appeared to be distant from the rest of the students in the room. Although his intentions appeared to be those of the students, he did not seem to argue on the issues as much as the other student members of the review committee. He often seemed too comfortable being spoon-fed information from the elder members of the committee.

If that wasn't strange enough, what happened when the committee broke for lunch that day was more awkward. When a student from Stevens Point asked him for a comment on the meeting for the student radio station, Mr. Shields refused to comment and just walked away. Why wouldn't a student member of the committee want the students to know what is going on in the meeting?

As a member of the Student Rights Campaign, I had to work with the other campaign members to make sure a student-friendly segregated fee policy passed. One of our objectives was to make sure all the student members of the review committee were on board with what the students wanted from the new policy. All of the student members were cooperative and easy to get in touch with, except for Mr. Shields. I tried to contact him several times myself — voicemails, e-mails, Facebook messages — and he never acknowledged any of them. Shouldn't Mr. Shields' first priority be to respond to the students? Needless to say, the same policy that we were fighting against passed at the next meeting, and as was previously mentioned, Mr. Shields was nowhere to be found. Is he not supposed to be our vessel to the Board of Regents? The answer is yes, and there is no excuse for his absence from that meeting.

Mr. Shields may have started out fighting for the rights of the students, but he seems to have become complacent at best. He is failing us, the students of the UW System, and now all we can look forward to is the end of his term in 2008.

Andrew Traverse ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in business.