Last term, small white signs decrying the recent budget cuts appeared on bulletin boards around campus. The signs, which criticized College spending in light of cuts to academic and athletic programs, linked two separate areas of the budget and reminded the campus that in an economic downturn, all areas of College spending are vulnerable to increased scrutiny.
Organizations that receive student activities funding -- including the Undergraduate Finance Committee, the Programming Board, the Student Assembly and the Committee on Student Organizations -- work outside of the College's operating budget. Their funding comes instead from a large pot made up of the $57 per term contributions of every student.
Yet while such groups have not sustained budget reductions, members and the administrators who oversee them nonetheless said they have felt the weight of the year's campus-wide cuts. The impact of Dartmouth's economic situation has left them acutely aware of the necessity of careful monitoring what constitutes
worthwhile spending.
"You obviously use another filter as you are making decisions about what to fund," Dean of Student Life Holly Sateia said. "You do hold people more accountable for how money is spent."
However, representatives of COSO, the UFC, the Student Budget Advisory Committee and the Programming Board maintain that their organizations continue to be held carefully accountable for all spending, and that they are careful to approve only those expenditures that benefit the campus at large.
"SA, if anything, has to be the most accountable spending organization on campus because our proposals are reported so publicly in The D, the Assembly newsletter and online," Student Life Chair Amit Anand '03 said. "Other organizations might even be able to get away with overspending, but SA is so accountable to the entire campus and the entire student body that that is impossible."
Still, despite a consensus about the need for careful decision-making, just what qualifies as worthwhile spending remains a topic of debate -- and even within organizations themselves there is considerable disagreement over the kind of programs student activities money should fund.
Special Measures
Some groups think the controversy over budget cuts requires official changes in the manner in which student activities money can be distributed.
The Student Budget Advisory Committee -- formed at the end of Fall term in response to complaints that budget cuts had been made without sufficient student input -- is considering a proposal that would call for organizations such as the Programming Board to be allowed to fund programs such as lecture series, which are commonly paid for by academic department discretionary budgets.
The committee has yet to make a formal recommendation to Provost Barry Scherr, since any proposal hinges on the yet-to-be-finalized cuts to academic departments, but the group has suggested the idea to members of the Programming Board, Anand said.
"I think there seems to be a general sense of criticism on campus," Anand said. "On the one hand, people say the campus is almost over-programmed, but on the other hand, people see very visibly the effects of budget cuts."
The widespread criticism of academic cuts from students justifies a compromise, Anand added -- allowing groups like the Programming Board to pay for lectures and other similar events. In the past, the Programming Board has made a point of funding only student-initiated programs.
"The more competition there is for proposals, the better the proposals have to be," he said. "Currently the Programming Board might have a select number of proposals on their dockets, but if we add more proposals it kind of raises the bar for the level of programs that should be funded."
But Sateia, who oversees student activities programming and funding, as well as other members of the Programming Board said that in making such changes, the Committee has to make sure it is in fact doing what students want.
The committee should "keep in mind that students are asking for a fuller social life or a richer social life than the Greek system," Sateia said.
"This is the only money that's available to student organizations to program in that way," she added. "I would want them to think about the impact of shifting funds and what does that really mean."
Others argue that the same quality of programming can be achieved without changing the fundamental purpose of the Programming Board or other such groups. COSO recently granted College recognition and funding to the Dartmouth Independent Forum, which students founded to bring speakers to campus who are unaffiliated with the Rockefeller Center and academic department sponsorship, COSO representative Michael Reeves '05 said.
Entertainment First
Programming Board members, meanwhile, remain committed to the organization's traditional focus on social programming. The group recently received College funding to send five of its members and two advisors to an all-expenses-paid weekend conference designed to improve social programming.
Participants maintain that the conference -- held in a Nashville convention center by the National Association for Campus Activities -- ended up saving the College money because they were able to book big-name performers at a special reduced rate. They also said the informational sessions were enlightening and insisted that what they learned there will benefit the campus as a whole.
Whether this is enough to satisfy critics of Programming Board spending, though, is difficult to say. The informational sessions, which were "professionally taught," included advice on how best to save money and attract more people to events, Dan Hui '05 said. An added benefit was being able to get advice and input from students at other colleges, since nearly 2,500 students from 500 schools attended the conference, he said.
"Through NACA we were able to get all these ideas about the Programming Board and programming at our school that I really don't think we could have gotten any other any other way," Kori Yee Litt '05 said. "Not only is it financially a smart place to go, but it also builds leaderships and it builds leaders."
Neither Litt nor Hui knew how much Dartmouth spent to send them to the conference, but they noted that attending allowed Dartmouth to book performers for next year at a 30-40 percent discount. Programming Board advisor Ruth Morgan did not respond to interview requests, but Sateia said she has a special fund for sending students to conferences and that, if anything, the problem lies in informing students the money is available.
To make sure the students get the most out of attending such conferences, the Office of Student Life requires candidates to fill out a form saying who will be going, how they were selected, and how the organization requesting the funding intends to share the information with others after the participants return to campus, Sateia said.
The form aims to encourage students to reflect on their experiences without demanding too much effort from notoriously busy students, Sateia said.
Money for Nothing
The difficulty in striking a balance between accountability and feasibility is something other organizations such as COSO also struggle with.
At the beginning of each term, COSO holds a large meeting where representatives of each organization convene to hear announcements, procedural changes -- and receive $100 each simply for showing up. The $100 is a way of encouraging groups to send representatives to a meeting that is heavy on procedure and light on entertainment, but considering the huge number of COSO-funded groups, it also costs COSO several thousand dollars.
But COSO representatives said that although the Committee received about $25,000 more money this year than in the past, they spend more time now than ever advising groups on how they could hold the same quality programs by spending less.
"If anything the budget situation has caused us to exercise our advisory role more than before," Anand said. Moreover, because representatives are appointed freshman year and serve for the duration of their tenure at Dartmouth, the organization has "great institutional memory" about how much similar programs have cost in the past and can easily recognize that even if groups think they need extravagant sums, they often don't, Anand said.
When groups ask for more money than they really need, it is either because they have made errors in their calculations, or because two groups co-programming an event ask for money for the same things, Reeves said. Rarely do groups blatantly try to exploit the system, COSO representatives said.
"Groups generally are pretty conservative in what they ask for," Reeves said. "I don't think there is a lot of overspending."
However, he noted that some groups have preferred to hire their friends as disc jockeys -- and then ask for exorbitant sums to pay them. In response, COSO has placed a $25 per hour limit on the money it will grant for disc jockeys. Also, a trend toward using more elaborate technology such as complicated video equipment means that events are getting more expensive, Anand said.
But although COSO is willing to negotiate some items, it draws a clear line on others. The organization puts a $5 per person limit on dinner programs and a $2 per person limit on programs that include snacks. Reeves noted that groups could potentially fudge their numbers, but "they don't usually figure that out, and if they did, we'd know," he said.
Nevertheless, some kinds of programs seem to slip through COSO's elaborate system of checks and balances, which granted funding to 38 out of 45 possible proposals that went before the committee during Winter term.
COSO granted the College Republicans $190 to hold a "Ronald Reagan Birthday Bash," which the group used as a reason to rent out Fuel, hire a student jazz ensemble, and buy soda, snacks, decorations and nine pizzas. The event attracted approximately a dozen people over the course of the evening, nearly all of them members of the College Republicans.
"I think it's friggin' hysterical that we can walk up to COSO and get them to pay for this," one participant said.
"I wish COSO was here to see us basically throwing a party for ourselves," another added.
Nevertheless, they noted that the traditional performance by the Aires was vetoed since COSO deemed the Aires' $500 going rate too steep.
Even if some programs inadvertently slip through the cracks, sometimes COSO agrees to fund programs that it knows will serve only a small group of people. $30,000 of COSO's approximately $200,000 budget goes to the Mock Trial team to pay for travel to tournaments, Reeves noted.
However, because COSO is the team's only source of College funding, and because team members are so successful at major tournaments, COSO considers the expenditures worth it, he said.
Still, COSO membership continues to be careful about granting funding to groups that appear not to include a diverse array of members, Reeves said, citing a proposal to create a group called The Dartmouth Tradition, which COSO granted only provisional status because the founders seemed to be a homogenous group with rather narrow interests -- in this case, several '03 and '04 members of sororities.
"It really did look like a group of friends," Reeves said. "We do look for diversity in classes so the group can continue in years to come."