The most recent controversy playing itself out in the Student Senate office, the pages of The Spectator and the conversations of students walking across the Campus Mall has been the appropriation of $403 to The Flip Side.

As Student Senate Finance Commission director, I have heard the numerous arguments for and against funding it.

After considering all the factors, the Finance Commission voted not to give The Flip Side student segregated fees for the next budget. We then were overruled by the Student Senate.

I hope I can shed some light on why the initial funding was denied and why Senate was wrong to fund them anything at all.

Finance Commission, as its name implies, deals with money. The Flip Side, like every other activity that comes before the commission, presented a budget that outlined its needs and why it sought funds.

This, however, is where the similarities between The Flip Side and all other organizations end.

The publication’s budget was turned in a day late. It was asking for money for the first time, but was less professional than the other organizations that get far more money and do far more for the student body.

I cannot imagine Health Services or Athletics would turn in a late budget.

Any new organization deserves greater scrutiny than an established one, and The Flip Side did not even make it to the hearings without acting like it didn’t know what was expected of it. If this flub were the Commission’s only complaint, we could have chalked it up to a first-year glitch.

But it was just the final misstep in a series that proved to us that The Flip Side was not professional. Worse, it also showed the organization had no idea what segregated fee funding would mean for the paper.

One of the major complaints The Flip Side used to appeal to the Senate was it never got a clear picture of Finance Commission’s qualifications and could not be expected to follow a procedure that was foggy at best.

While I admit there is no specific time table for becoming an organized activity, Matthew Flaten, Student Senate’s finance director from fall 2003, gave it the same criteria I had to give to it again in the fall of 2004, and The Flip Side still took another two months to fill out the last of its paperwork.

That last change was the removal of the affiliation of The Flip Side with the Progressive Student Association.

PSA is a liberal group on campus that brings together like-minded students to rally on progressive causes and make change.

I believe members are entitled to do that and are further entitled to support The Flip Side by co-signing grants.

However, I do not believe The Flip Side’s affiliation, as well as the fact that virtually all the founding members of the paper also are founding members of PSA, entitles it to claim to be “independent and non-ideological.”

The Flip Side says it doesn’t reject conservative articles and then points to the 10 percent of recent issues it gets from Republicans and expects it to convince us, just like Fox News points to Alan Colmes to prove how “fair and balanced” it is.

Now, I think there is a place for liberal commentary on campus, but I don’t think it should get student funding.

The Spectator has pages of procedures for dealing with columns and letters to ensure neutrality. The Flip Side does not.

There is nothing stopping it from rejecting all but a few conservative articles and then pointing to its “objectivity.”

While the founders of both groups may have good intentions, there is nothing stopping the paper’s editors from turning The Flip Side into UW-Eau Claire’s paper bi-weekly “O’Reilly Factor.”

Finance did not want to set the precedent that a paper that not only has been unprofessional, but also had the potential to be extremely biased, get funding.

Student Senate, however, used different criteria to judge The Flip Side. Much of the debate was not on whether the organization was professional or even if it was biased, but rather on how much individual senators liked it.

Two senators who voted for funding worked for The Flip Side. I got a note from another senator after I inquired on why he or she was in support of funding the publication, and it simply stated, “I likes my Flip Side.”

Similarly, The Flip Side was credited with being a neat idea that added that “certain something” to campus.

Nowhere was the debate of professionalism, credibility or comparability to The Spectator. No, Senate funded The Flip Side because it thought the paper was cool.

The last example of how unprofessional The Flip Side was can be seen here in The Spectator, where one of its co-founders considered $403 a “victory.”

The $403 doesn’t cover two issues of The Flip Side, a mighty victory indeed!

As I close, I’d like to mention that at the beginning of my term, I was open to the idea of funding The Flip Side. I thought if it was professional and non-biased it deserved a shot, but the paper failed to prove that to me and six other Finance Commission members.

And, before anyone accuses me of being a right wing shrill with a deep seeded hatred of free speech or The Flip Side, I’d like to point out that I worked as an intern for the Feingold campaign last summer, am a registered Democrat and founded Eau Claire’s Students for Howard Dean chapter. If I can smell the bias, imagine if I were Republican.

Wisnefske is a senior political science major, director of Student Senate’s Finance Commission and a columnist for The Spectator.