The Illinois Student Senate passed a resolution regarding University funding at its last general meeting of the semester Wednesday evening.

The resolution, which passed with a vote of 27 to eight with one abstention, urges “the President and Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois to commit to freezing tuition and fees on the Urbana-Champaign campus for AY (academic year) 2010-11.”

It also pushes for state government to “direct sufficient state revenue to the University of Illinois system such that tuition and fee increases will not be necessary for AY 2010-11.”

Richard Potter, author of the resolution and graduate student, emphasized the effect of the budget crisis on students. He said, if the students are divided into fifths, financial aide protects the lower one-fifth and wealth protects the upper one-fifth.

“It’s the middle three-fifths that have the most to lose if we raise tuition,” Potter said.

Potter acknowledged the resolution may not directly have an impact on decision-making but can suggest changes to those who do have an impact, such as administrators.

“I wish that the resolution that I’m offering you tonight did have a little more bite in it, but it doesn’t.” Potter said. “It urges. It urges the administration to freeze (tuition) and it urges the state legislators to direct the necessary funds, but that’s something.”

Rohit Dhake, chairman of the ISS committee on governmental affairs and former vice president-internal, said his committee was unanimously against the resolution at its meeting Monday.

“Given how dire of a state the University is in, I think it’s really extreme in trying to say that we should essentially freeze tuition,” Dhake said. “It’s not like the state has just some sort of bucket of money lying around. The state is in even a worse financial condition so it’s not like they don’t want to give us money, they don’t even have money to give us.”

He said with the inflation rate at about three percent for the general economy and about six or seven percent for higher education, a freeze in tuition would essentially be a decrease in tuition.

“Given that teachers are taking furloughs, departments are getting cut, salaries are getting cut and the state owes us hundreds of millions of dollars, I don’t think we’re in any position to try to decrease the budget even further and then try to, at the same time, complain about how programs are getting cut,” Dhake said. “It just seems illogical.”

Several students and community members were present to oversee the vote of the resolution. Many senators who spoke in support of it were greeted with applause.

Ben Rothschild, sophomore in LAS, spoke in favor of the resolution along with several others during the public comment portion of the meeting.

“I and many students feel that the job the administration has done is not a satisfactory job,” Rothschild said. “We want them to lower their salaries and we want them to listen more specifically to our suggestions and continue the conversation to fix this University because public education is broken.”

Rothschild suggested a 5 percent salary cut for highly paid administrators.

“There’s six figure salaries among the administration that could be going towards preventing a tuition hike,” he said. “It’s a very small part of the University budget but it’s a symbolic thing that has really generated a lot of mistrust in the University.”

The senate also voted in favor of a resolution supporting priority registration for Reserve Officer Training Corps., or ROTC, students and another that would create town hall events inviting candidates for the 2010 General Election to campus to speak with students.