Finally, a topic that has nothing to do with Jason Mueller or an incarnation of the cliched "best player in the trapezoid formed by the Poopon River, the Purple Mountains, and New Albania-Katchetorian state line." Thank you, Lee Henry. Anyway, I have noticed that two-year programs have a much more significant faculty involvement than four-year programs. For example, it seems Mr. Borglum handles affairs at Valencia, etc., whereas the agents in charge at the four-year schools are actual students. This does not mean there is no faculty involvement, however. I am not sure why this is the case. At Maryland, we have a faculty advisor, but we almost never see him. I think his most practical role is helping us reserve rooms; he is in the math department, and we run our high school tournaments in the math building. As you can tell from the last sentence, he does not need to travel with us, nor does he ever do that. I do not know if we are required to have a faculty advisor to get Student Government Association funding. Anyway, we run ourselves pretty independently. We get some SGA funds, but we could be self-sufficient if necessary. We elect our own officers. The money we make from tournaments is spent entirely at our discretion. At Maryland, officers must be undergraduates, but other than that almost anyone is eligible to run in May elections. We have the standard President-VP-Treasurer-Secretary four horsemen of the leadership, and they fill the roles you would expect. Those roles are outlined in a constitution. I do not know you personally, Lee Henry, but it appears your schools reluctancy to hand over day-to-day operations to you is not personal, but is a bureaucratic measure of some sorts. Maybe if some leaders of circuit teams wrote "letters of recommendation" stating that quiz bowl programs around the circuit run just fine when executed by student leadership, your organization could achieve greater self- sufficiency. Just a jumbled mess of ideas. I hope it makes sense; I hope it spurs a good conversation to flush out this Jason Mueller crap; and I hope to see Athens State stick around on the circuit. Daniel Greenstein Maryland Academic Quiz Team
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