It’s ten o’clock; do you know where your money is?

Let us start with a basic proposition: student life fees should go towards providing collective services to students, including clubs, to host free or heavily subsidized events for students (according to Spectator reporting, approximately $198 of each student’s per-semester student life fees go to such). This should not be a hard proposition to accept. While drudging about for my last column, though, I began to suspect that perhaps it just doesn’t work out that way every time.

Take this abstract example sketched out for me by an affiliate of one of the governing boards: a group receives its allotted chunk of money from Student Life and several other sources. It plans a small fundraising event, paid for in part with student life money. This event is held to raise funds for a larger function later in the year (this later event is intended to profit a charity, so the group wants to subsidize it to make sure that the bulk of earnings from event tickets go to their cause). But instead of using the money raised from their fundraiser to reimburse student life money for more free events in the future, the group’s members dump all sales, not just profits, into the funds for the charity event, for which students must still buy a ticket. Your student life fee, then, subsidizes the event without lowering the price for you—although you sponsor the cause indirectly out of your pocket.

Certain regulations exist against this, but not in every case. Besides, as has been noted in previous articles on the matter, it is easy for clubs to lose track of their accounts. Anecdotally, I, and I am sure many Columbians, am aware of members of clubs who have neglected to turn in spending forms or follow through on other such financial responsibilities and record-keeping tasks. Add to that a substantial oversight in small gifts by the University (under a certain amount, gifts to speakers of any sort—even, potentially, in-kind donations—need not be reported to advisors), and it seems excessively easy for one’s student fees to indirectly fund the Food Not Bombs movement when perhaps the student would have preferred Bombs Not Food.

When I ran all of this past the members (including leadership) of various clubs, I was astonished to hear how frequent such minor transgressions are. Perhaps the stories reported to me were not the full accounts, and I can say that on average, clubs with which I have been involved have done their level best to keep tabs on appropriate student life spending. However, there is the added caveat that each governing board has a host of regulations on how much student life money may be spent on any one project—ABC requires no more than $2.50 per head on food for study breaks and “snack events,” no more than $15 spent on publicity for an event hosting between 31 and 100 students—which are almost impossible to enforce (and in my personal experience and the anecdotal experience of other students almost never are). One way or another, your student life money will get lost in the hodgepodge and winds up overspent and/or misappropriated.

I make no claims to know the exact numbers in this case—that depth slightly evades my purview as a hinky, little columnist. As usual, I merely attempt to stir the muck in hopes that someone will rake it. And rightly it is muck that should be raked post-haste.

On July 17, 2009, F@CU—the inter-council oversight committee for student life fee appropriations—issued a statement indicating that all governing boards would suffer an approximate 15 percent cut in funding, to say nothing of additional cuts specific to each board. The letter made clear the fact that the demand for increased funding has outstripped the growth of available funds for some number of years. This mismatched situation has only been sustainable due to the redistribution of board surpluses from year to year. But the days of milk and honey are over. In addition to cuts, F@CU announced that it would oppose dedicated co-sponsorships for recurring events, voicing the view that groups should be able to anticipate this and fund such large events on their own.

As the year moves along, we shall see the results of these F@CU cuts and stances. But I will hazard one guess: with reduced funds, increased programming, a multiplicity of groups, and less guaranteed co-sponsorship, student groups may well be forced toward “creative accounting” solutions, dramatically increasing the intentional or unintentional misappropriation of student life fees. Personally, I could live with this, but to those who oppose the misappropriations, increased oversight and accountability will inevitably have to result in less and less grand and charitable programming. Unless, of course, our brilliant student body would care to rake the muck, spin their cogs, and come up with a unique solution to our little quandary.

Mark Hay is a Columbia College sophomore. Unusual, Unseemly, or Unnoticed runs alternate Fridays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com