Mad money

Student leadership is facing a beginning of the semester that is grossly out of control. The Funding at Columbia University committee—a body of incoming and outgoing student council members that distributes student activities fees to the budgets of student umbrella organizations—was scheduled to release these budgets in May. This year, F@CU released the numbers three months behind schedule. Making matters worse, the final decisions diminished both the Student Governing Board’s and Community Impact’s budgets by 3 percent and 3.82 percent respectively, leaving them scrambling when they should have known in May what their funds would be for the upcoming year. It has quickly become evident just how disorganized—and even unfair—the budgeting process was. But while the fault may lie with F@CU for delaying decisions and unethically allotting their funds, the financial woes that groups are now experiencing cannot be solved by merely one party.

The first major problem was the lack of organization, which led to an inability to make decisions. Kevin Zhai, a member of F@CU and the current vice president of funding for the Columbia College Student Council, told Spectator that there was a “lack of procedure” and that the committee had no “mechanism by which decisions could be made.” Aside from the appalling notion that students with almost one million dollars to distribute had no standard methods for making their decisions, it’s shameful that no one was willing to stand up and make the difficult choices amidst the disorganization, something that Zhai also admitted. Furthermore, the fact that F@CU stretched its decision-making into the summer meant that, practically, students were unable to sit in on meetings, which flies in the face of F@CU’s promise to be “fair and transparent,” as well as open to the Columbia public.

What’s equally objectionable is that F@CU’s decision to cut SGB funding by 3 percent seems to have been intended to spite the Board for requesting a 35 percent increase in funds. Understandably, F@CU had to make sacrifices in order to increase funds for the Inter-Greek Council, which recently recognized sororities at Barnard and gained a significant increase in membership. But there were other factors at play—Narayan Subramanian, a member of F@CU and outgoing vice president of intergroup, said that SGB’s budget request was “ridiculously high and fundamentally disrespectful to the F@CU committee.” In other words, F@CU maintains that it wasn’t as much the number that SGB requested that was “disrespectful,” but SGB’s decision to ignore F@CU’s warnings in previous years to propose smaller budgets. SGB’s funding proposal may have been extreme, but F@CU’s response seems childish—as if its members were holding a grudge against SGB simply because it did not take the advice of a handful of student leaders.

While SGB plans to appeal its budget allocation in the hopes of reversing some of the damage from this decision, it is clearly going to take more than better organization and competence in F@CU to restore the system to working order. Student groups are known for requesting more funds from their representative boards than they actually need, and this has to stop. Clubs should not, as many do, spend furiously in the last few months of school to deplete the year’s extra budget and ask for even more funds the following year. It’s wasteful, and it keeps the money from going to new clubs and organizations that are either unable to be recognized, or scraping the bottom of the barrel to hold events. As SGB appeals its budget, it should also think of ways to incentivize clubs to save and be economical with their finances. And governing boards in general should propose realistic budgets based on the past year, which would make the job of F@CU members more manageable. With these significant changes on the part of student groups, and drastic reforms to F@CU operation, student groups might be able to get the money that they actually need, and in a way that’s not a pain for all involved.