With just nine days left in Student Senate campaigns, FACE presidential candidate Matthew Wallace is backing away from one of his platform’s major points.
Wallace said he wasn’t aware that OU is locked in a multi-year contract with AlcoholEdu, which he promised to eliminate, until current senate President Jesse Neader inquired about it at the candidates’ first debate Wednesday.
“I now see that it’s looking less and less likely that AlcoholEdu is going to be something that it’s possible to eliminate,” Wallace said yesterday.
Neader, who sat down with Wallace and RSVP presidential candidate Kyle Triplett prior to campaign season to discuss their platforms, said he thought some of FACE’s early promises were unrealistic.
“That’s absolutely not a surprise,” Neader said when informed that Wallace had changed his stance on AlcoholEdu. “When it got brought up to the public, it seems that his perception of the issue has changed.”
OU is in a multi-year contract with Outside the Classroom, AlcoholEdu’s parent company, said Dean of Students Ryan Lombardi.
The program costs the university about $10 per student, or about $41,000 a year, according to previous Post articles.
It would take some convincing for the university to break the contract, Lombardi said.
“From a contractual standpoint, I would assume there’s some type of penalty for that,” he said. “… We would need to see a very viable alternative.”
The debate was the first Wallace had heard of the contract, he said.
“I wasn’t privy to the information that it would be almost impossible,” he said, adding that opening Budget Planning Council meetings is a bigger point of his party’s platform. “I’d be willing to get more input and possibly let the issue die.”
However, Wallace said he might still try to pass a resolution advocating the program’s discontinuation if he is elected.
“If everything goes my way and FACE sweeps the election, we’ll be passing a lot of resolutions,” he said.
RSVP is not campaigning to nix AlcoholEdu because it is an important way for OU to gather information about its incoming freshman class, Triplett said.
“I’m not surprised he’s backing out of it,” Triplett said. “I knew that if they would have gotten anything out of that it would have taken some serious work.”
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