Budget allocation time is coming up, and maybe the Student Senate could add a line item in order to purchase a dictionary. One $20 dictionary. It would solve a debate that’s been rumbling through the senate for a couple of weeks now.

To sum up, the organizers of the Miss Black EIU pageant asked Student Senate for $100. In return, Student Senate would receive a full-page advertisement in the program handed out to spectators at the pageant.

Senate members voted no to the proposition, although the vote was very close, a rarity in the bandwagon senate. The argument was that Student Senate did not want to set a precedent by giving a donation to a group or activity on campus, lest all the others line up for handouts, too.

This I understand. Once you give some scratch to someone, especially as a political body, everyone else wants some and then wonders why there’s not enough for everybody.

But let’s look up the word “donation,” shall we?

According to Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary, it is “an act or instance of presenting something as a gift, grant or contribution.” In turn, a gift is “something given voluntarily without payment in return.”

Is this what senate members were doing? Were they giving away student money for nothing?

No. They were buying an advertisement. They were getting something very specific and substantial in return for their $100. Whether the advertisement would be worth $100 is beyond me – I’m not a marketing major.

But buying advertising is not donating money. If it is, then this newspaper is almost completely funded by donations and our advertising representatives aren’t ad reps, they’re solicitors for a charity.

Art Davis, student vice president for student affairs, tried valiantly to smack some sense back into his colleagues when he stressed that, “It’s an ad … it’s for us.” But once Student Senate gets its mitts on an argument, no matter how insignificant and pointless, it doesn’t let go.

Thus, this whole argument has been charging at a red cape that doesn’t even exist.

To compound the problem, senate member James Paton has introduced a bylaw change that would prevent Student Senate from giving away donations.

Talk about overreaction. You don’t solve arguments by completely banning their instigating factors – that’s essentially censorship. And what happens if, at some point, a future senate sees a cause to which it would like to donate money, and can’t because of this silly bylaw? Either they’ll shrug and say, “Our hands are tied,” or they’ll change the bylaw again, wasting valuable time and energy.

On top of that, the proposed change didn’t specifically define the word “donation,” something you think would be an integral part of a rule banning them. It doesn’t take much to look up the definitions – it took me 30 seconds. But Student Body President Katie Cox said,”It’s a good idea to stay somewhat vague.”

Really? And what’s the reasoning behind this?

“We can’t see into the future,” she said.

Exactly. No one can, and that is the same reason why making such a rule is ridiculous.

But this is what happens in Student Senate. Virtually every time there’s a bump in the road, they call in eight bulldozers, two cement trucks and a platoon of construction workers. Even when it turns out that that’s not really a bump in the road at all, it’s just a rock that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.