As of Wednesday, both the undergraduate and graduate student government bodies support having Veterans Day off at UNM.
ASUNM passed the Veterans day resolution during Wednesday’s senate meeting, after the Graduate and Professional Student Association passed the same bill Aug. 31.
In the final ASUNM vote, 10 senators were in favor of the redrafted resolution, four were against, and there was one abstention.
The Student Veterans of UNM presented the resolution at an ASUNM meeting two weeks ago, but it was sent back to the Steering and Rules Committee for editing. The committee changed the wording in several places and added attribution to statistics in the resolution.
Senator Laz Cardenas presented the revised resolution on Wednesday to ASUNM on behalf of the Student Veterans of UNM.
“We changed a part of a sentence that said ‘our nation’s true heroes’ to ‘some of our nation’s true heroes,’” Cardenas said.
One part of the resolution that said, “Whereas veterans attending the University of New Mexico earn over $6 million in benefits for graduate and undergraduate studies per semester,” was taken out.
“We took out this sentence because we weren’t sure of the plausibility of this number,” Cardenas said.
Cardenas said that such a resolution is not law — it just shows that the undergraduate student body is in favor of having a day off from school to observe Veterans Day.
Senator Alyssa Rivera voted against the Veterans Day resolution. She said the wording that gives veterans full credit for freedom in America still wasn’t right. She said people who do diplomatic work, students who study abroad and nongovernmental organizations all contribute to freedom as well as those in the military.
“I only had one problem, which was specifically the second clause that reads, ‘Freedom is not free. It is paid by the blood and sacrifice of the men and women in the service of our state, nation and through military service,’” Rivera said. “I just thought that it should be changed to not being paid for entirely in that way. We should recognize the sacrifice and blood that these people shed in contributing to freedom but not (their) being completely responsible for it.”
Zack Mutchler, president of the Student Veterans of UNM, said he doesn’t mind the changes that were made, because the integrity of the resolution was intact. The Student Veterans will take their resolution to the faculty senate as their next step, he said.
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“The student governments at UNM represent their constituents, which are 28,000 to 30,000 students,” Mutchler said. “These resolutions basically let the Faculty Senate know that the student body is behind us in this.”
Mutchler said the Faculty Senate presents the academic calendar to the Board of Regents, and the regents have the final word on the observance of Veterans Day.
Mutchler said the support of both ASUNM and GPSA will help their case at the Faculty Senate meeting.
“UNM exists because of students and UNM is here to serve students — that’s the entire purpose of a university,” Mutchler said. “With that in mind, arguments about cost, HR problems, labor disputes or things of that nature need to be put aside, need to be worked through and amended so the University can service the students. Now, they can see the students are asking for this day of observance.”
Faculty Senate President Douglas Fields said the organization hasn’t yet taken a stance on a Veterans Day holiday.
“We’ve discussed it briefly. We haven’t actually written a resolution yet,” he said. “What we’re going to do is write a resolution that supports Veterans Day and leave the discussion about what the holidays are to the Faculty/Staff Benefits Committee. So, we certainly support the idea of a veterans holiday in recognition of the veterans, but we think the idea of whether or not we’ll take that day off needs more discussion.”
Fields said the Faculty/Staff Benefits Committee deals with pay, benefits and days off, and they would like draft a resolution for the regents before Veterans Day this year.
