Where's the Money?

While "insufficient funds," per the title of last year's Varsity Show, is a common refrain across campus, significant reform is required before the University can provide additional funding for clubs. Columbia's system of student group financial management is a twisted web of complex budgets, closed meetings, and unsatisfactory financial allocations. The current system is in need of massive reform. Student leaders and administrators should concentrate on allowing groups to apply for money more regularly and streamlining the co-sponsorship process. Making Columbia's funding infrastructure more accessible and reasonable will help students understand how the people doling out money reached their decisions.

Funding at Columbia University—labeled with the unfortunate acronym F@CU—is a system in which the incoming and outgoing treasurers and presidents of the four undergraduate student councils meet privately each spring to divide up funds among the five governing boards at Columbia and WKCR. This year, those allocations totaled close to $750,000. Before the final decisions are made, each governing board is required to turn in hundreds of pages of information about all the student clubs that sit under it and attend a hearing about its allocation request. Members on F@CU then spend a weekend debating how much money they should give each board. Their decisions are final.

This process sounds complicated and inefficient, and it is. A number of steps have been taken recently to make the procedure more transparent, such as posting the allocations and explanations of the numbers online for each governing board. But this is not enough to give board members a full and accurate picture of how and why funding decisions are made. As a result, club boards are often left with less funds than they would like.

Several changes can be made to improve the process and its results. F@CU should open their meetings up to the public to engender more trust in the process. A more hands-on system of club activity monitoring should also be put in place to hold groups accountable for their self-reported estimates of group membership and programming attendance numbers—two metrics used to help determine allocation figures. To this end, governing board representatives should be required to spend more time monitoring the activities of their designated groups to ensure that each club deserves the money it has requested. And Columbia should conduct a UNI-verified poll of students each year to see the clubs in which clubs they are most active participants. This would give the University and governing boards a better—if imperfect—idea of comparative sizes of clubs.

Additionally, co-sponsoring organizations such as the Chaplain's Fund, the CU Arts Sainsbury Fund, the President and Provost's Fund, and all four undergraduate student councils should work together to create one streamlined application process for co-sponsorships. There are currently almost a dozen co-sponsoring organizations, making it difficult for students to know who to apply to. Students should fill out one application that all the co-sponsorship funds could then evaluate individually, as with the Common Application used in college admissions.

Should these reform efforts fail to alleviate the apparent funding crunch for active student groups, it may become necessary for the University to seek additional funds either by raising the student life fee or drawing on a portion of the endowment. Still, administrators and student leaders' focus should be first and foremost on reforming the process to make it more transparent and efficient. This way, club funding can truly fulfill the needs of active student groups on campus to allow for a more vibrant array of programs on campus.