Curators vote down Student Legal Services expansion
The push by the Missouri Students Association and the Graduate Professional Council to expand Student Legal Services ended with a tie vote by the UM system Board of Curators at their meeting Friday. The even vote means a SLS attorney will not be representing students in landlord/tenant cases in court, as MSA and GPC had proposed.
MSA President Jordan Paul said the vote was especially surprising because the proposal was presented to the board by Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Cathy Scroggs and UM system President Gary Forsee.
“On many issues that MSA brings to the Board of Curators, the administration is on a different page and what’s really surprising about this vote is that, for once, the administration and ourselves were on the same page,” Paul said.
The proposal’s approval would have lifted the prohibition put on SLS preventing the department from representing students in court, but instead SLS will continue to provide legal consultation to students.
Paul said the proposal was modeled after the University of Kansas’ legal services system, which allows university attorneys to represent students.
Although Forsee recommended MSA and GPC revise the proposal, Paul said he wasn’t sure what the next step would be.
“I don’t know what else we could have done,” he said. “The proposal was about as watered down as it can get already.”