_This weekly column is brought to you by a partnership between The Maneater and The Associated Students of the University of Missouri, the official student lobbying group for the UM System’s 77,000 students. ASUM has four legislative issues on their platform: the budget, a voting student curator, landlord-tenant relations and a STEM initiative._
The Missouri General Assembly will be taking a spring break until March 29. ASUM has pushed to get all its legislation heard in both House and Senate committees. With gridlock grinding the Senate to a halt, ASUM’s legislation could take a backseat. In light of this, we are looking for innovative ways to move our legislation forward. The ASUM Intern team is currently in talks with Sen. Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, about potentially adding the Student Curator legislation as an amendment to a similar bill. Moreover, the House speaker has said that HB 2520 — which would provide for a more impartial method for handling disputed security deposits — will be referred to committee soon.
**Ramifications of Senate filibuster for existing legislation**
After the Republicans in the Missouri Senate killed the 39-hour filibuster of a bill dubbed as “religious freedom” legislation by its proponents and as anti-LGBTQ by its opponents, a tense stand-off threatens the passage of any further legislation in this session. This was center stage March 10 with the minority party’s incessant use of procedural tactics to prevent a motion to waive the reading of the Senate Journal and to prevent senators from introducing special guests—including a group of student researchers from the UM System. The only legislation safe from this type of split is the state’s $27 billion budget, which the Senate is required to pass as per the Missouri Constitution. While the usage of the same “previous question” move to cut-off debate over a right-to-work bill led to a similar shutdown last session, this comes far earlier and, consequently, could have much larger implications.
**Doctoral program legislation aims to increase competition, but promises to stretch state dollars and devalue existing programs**
There is currently legislation filed in both the House (HB 2622) and Senate (SB 1088) that would promote and allow all public four-year higher education institutions within the state to create graduate and doctoral programs. While this bill aims to spur competition by encouraging a proliferation of new programs, the UM System argues that it will negatively impact the quality of programs that already exist. With doctoral programs significantly more costly to fund than undergraduate programs, the emergence of duplicate programs would invariably stretch state dollars and limit the amount of funding that can be dedicated toward programs that have a proven track-record of success. Such decreases, especially on MU’s campus, could further threaten its status as the only public AAU university in the state. ASUM believes that this bill will undermine the value of UM System students’ degrees or require an unlikely tax increase on Missourians.
Currently, the UM System partners with other four-year institutions within the state on 42 different graduate and doctoral programs. These include pharmacy and engineering programs at Missouri State, a dental school between UMKC and Missouri Southern. While the goal of this legislation is to increase accessibility and promote competition within the state, the potential ramifications are decreases in quality of the current programs that the UM System has to offer.
**Undergraduate Research Day**
Students from all four UM System campuses visited the Capitol on Tuesday to present the research they had been conducting over the past year for Undergraduate Research Day. Bailee Kain, a senior studying Biochemistry at MU, presented on her research in the PGM1 deficiency that occurs from DNA mutations. Her research into changing protein structures would aid the quality of life that is presented in the symptoms of the PGM1 deficiency. In addition, Jenna Slocum, ASUM Legislative Intern and a sophomore studying Nuclear Engineering at Missouri S&T, presented research on the production of radioactive nanoparticles for cancer treatment. Her research could create a quicker process for creating cancer treatments, as well as reducing chemotherapy time, doses and side effects.
