Our view: The University and the administrators cannot continue to dance around important subjects and must make timely decisions.

The solution: Administrators must move discussions and decisions that affect students from the back to the front burner to give ample time for input and thought.

Every year the University goes through the same process of deciding how much students will pay the following year in student fees. And every year the University runs into the same problems of having a crunched window of time, thus allowing hasty and sometimes ill-informed decisions to be made.

Often, when the University procrastinates on student fees, it causes a compressed timeline that doesn’t allow adequate time and consideration for students to have their voices heard. More often than not, the Fee Review Committee gathers at times when attending is not convenient to most students, generally meeting in the mid-afternoon when students are in class, or early in the morning, at 7 a.m.

Last night, the Fee Review Committee was formally established and is required to have its final recommendation to Chancellor James Oblinger by 5 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 5 — giving the committee only 23 days to complete this important task.

Twenty-three days is not enough time to elicit ample opinion or give proper thought to make a rational and informed decision. It is not long enough to weigh pros and cons of each fee and the overall impact on not only the individual fee units, but more significantly the wallets of the students and their families.

Oblinger must take an active role to stretch out the timeline to ensure that all perspectives can be heard when it comes to the fee issue. Currently, the overall fee package has to be voted on by the Board of Trustees at its November meeting; conversely our friends down the road in Chapel Hill hold their final vote in January.

Having more time to think and evaluate each fee request carefully would benefit all at our University. Allowing the Fee Review Committee members to take their time and not rush this important task would give them more credibility in the overall process. Students will be more apt to accept the recommendations if they know decisions were not made out of knee-jerk reactions, but careful analysis.

This must be the final year that this condensed timeline is used when assessing student fees. University officials need to do more to accomplish the task of getting a longer timeline, and it all starts at the top.