We urge the student body to show their strong support for the student activities funding referendum that will be voted on this Friday. One of the glaring weaknesses of Georgetown University is its funding of student life. While the university is comprised of 6,200 undergraduate students, the equivalent of 12 students’ total cost to attend Georgetown are applied to student organizations each year. The University suggests that over three-quarters of our student body are involved in some club or organization on campus. For many students, the time spent in student organizations will prove to be the most rewarding and memorable time of their college years. These organizations are the university’s bastion of creativity and student energy, responsible for the most part for most of the noteworthy events that have occurred here in recent memory. They enhance student life and color the otherwise drab world that university life could be. It is absolutely critical that we fund our student organizations at reasonable amounts.
Our funding level is far below that of our peer institutions. Even after the high-profile deal inked with Coca-Cola recently, these organizations are funded at abysmally low levels and forced to share space in an ever more crowded Leavey Center. At the same time, tuition has continued to rise at about five percent each year, a rate well above that of inflation. Students should rightly wonder where exactly the extra money is going if it is not being applied to the clubs and organizations that define the college years for so many.
The funding proposal that will be put before the student body this Friday should go a long way towards correcting this problem. It phases in a $50 student activites fee, collected as a line item on the tuition bill in much the same way as the Yates fee is collected now. This fee will be used both to fund student groups in the present and to create and fund an endowment for student groups. The authors of the proposal also call for the allocation of three million dollars to student activities from the one billion dollar fundraising goal set by Georgetown’s Third Century Campaign. These funds would be used as seed money for the student activities endowment. If the plan works, and it certainly seems like it should, the amount of money spent on student groups will triple over the next 10 years.
Georgetown does not charge a student activities fee today as a line item on the tuition bill. Currently, it allocates $61.28 per student to student organizations. This is a paltry sum when compared with other universities that Georgetown compares itself with?Princeton University spends $180 per student and Dartmouth spends $150. In order to correct this deficiency, we need the introduction of a line item charge. This will set aside a portion of the tuition money to be spent only on student organizations. According to the numbers suggested by the authors of the funding proposal, Georgetown will be able to increase its per student spending to $111.28 by 2003. This figure is still far below the average of Georgetown’s peer institutions, but it is certainly an improvement over the current funding levels.
We do have some reservations about the funding proposal. While it certainly does address the most glaring problem in student life, the lack of funding for student organizations, it does not speak to the faulty mechanisms in place for distributing those funds to clubs. There are still too many layers of bureaucracy between student organizations and their funding. There is a perception on the part of many students that the university administration has too heavy a hand in distributing funds collected from the students for the students. Moreover, the current setup of funding boards lends itself too often to favoritism and cronyism. In order to truly correct all of the problems within student life, we as a student body must take a more comprehensive look at the way our student organizations are run and the way they are treated by the University.
However, we recognize that the authors of this plan did not set out to fix every problem they saw. Instead, they have invested a considerable amount of time drafting a comprehensive proposal that seems airtight. The complaint heard most often in the bowels of the Leavey Center from club leaders concerns the levels of funding for student groups. This plan should begin to change that. The six funding boards that distribute money to student organizations were allotted $389,784 in the FY 2000 budget. According to the conservative estimates of the authors of the funding proposal, the available budget for student activities would increase to $1 million by FY 2010. Certainly this kind of forward thinking is what is needed to solve the problems in student activities. Furthermore, it is notable that it is students, and not administrators, who have assumed the responsibility of providing the impetus for change.
The money would be distributed by a new board, called the GUSA Funding Board, which would be comprised of the president of GUSA and the heads of the six funding boards. Some administrators, including the Vice President of Student Affairs, would serve on the board in advisory positions, but the voting membership would be restricted to students. This is a step in the right direction for student groups, which for too long have depended on administrators for too much. By taking the initiative to draft this proposal, some students have taken the first step in correcting one of the most glaring problems with Georgetown’s student life. Now it is the job of the rest of us, as a student body, to give our overwhelming support to the plan when it comes before us as a referendum this Friday. Vote yes to increase student funding.
