University must increase SAC funding - The Message

University must increase SAC funding - The Message

By Sal Gentile · The Johns Hopkins News-Letter · May 5, 2005

In recent months, there has been an unprecedented explosion of student groups on campus. From Brazilian jujitsu to objectivism, Hopkins has groups that do anything and everything. What we lack, however, is a comprehensive plan for financing an increasing number of student organizations. The dire need for more SAC funding has increased exponentially in recent years, but the committee has seen no substantial augmentation to such funding.

The administration now has a unique opportunity to foster what many have lamented as a severely lacking on-campus community. With all kinds of diverse and unique cultural, sports, special interest and other organizations coming to the SAC for funding, the door is open for the administration to meet the challenge and support its student groups. The only way to encourage such growth and increase the odds that it continue in the future, however, is not to respond with a tight-fisted fiscal conservation that threatens to stifle any potential expansion in student involvement, but to promote an evolving on-campus student community that could potentially return a profit on the University's worthy investment.

The Student Activities Committee has recently been forced to go to great lengths to conserve as much funding as possible for case-by-case use over the course of the next school year.

The total allotment to student groups that get an annual budget for the 2006 fiscal year is about $180,000. These groups, in addition to the remaining organizations that don't get an annual budget, are eligible to come in at any time during the year for supplemental funding on a case-by-case basis. The total amount allotted for such funding is a fixed $100,000. Finally, with funding for student council groups included (a fixed $125,000), the total allotment from the Office of Student Involvement for the 2006 fiscal year is about $415,000.

It is important that the SAC supplement funding earmarked by the Office of Student Involvement each year by using fiscal caution. But, while made necessary by financial conditions, these conservative tendencies that hurt our student groups in the long run.

Regardless of whether you have a board full of liaisons that are looking out for the best interests of their groups 84 which, this year, we were fortunate enough to have 84 there is only so much wriggling that the committee can do when it is painfully conscious of the financial circumstances in which it must operate. An intrinsic tension exists between the board's duty to deliver money to their constituent groups and the board's obligation to conserve a portion to roll over and supplement funding for the following year.

This tension has been drastically exacerbated in recent months with an almost unprecedented explosion of student groups applying for SAC eligibility.

There are only two realistic solutions to this mounting problem. The first is a stricter SAC funding policy so that groups apply for and expect less from the board. There are already many specific and arbitrary guidelines that exclude funding for certain purposes and threaten to critically drain the budget (instructor's fees, for example).

Tightening these regulations even further, and thereby levying the burden on groups trying to obtain funding for basic functions, would be a setback to an already chronically inadequate on-campus student community. We should be encouraging the recent evolution of on-campus student activities, not punishing it.

The second solution, then, is simple: more funding. The SAC cannot depend on rollover funding from the previous year to supplement its annual budget. An emphasis on conserving enough money to roll over to the next fiscal year only defeats the purpose of having such money by providing the impetus to withhold it. The board should be able to spend its total, fixed amount of funding entirely in the year for which it was allotted, ideally with as little surplus as possible. But to do this, the annual budget allotted for each consecutive year needs to be higher than it is now.

Just by rudimentary calculation, if the administration wanted to increase the total annual financial allotment to the SAC from $415,000 to an even $500,000, it would have to increase each of its 4,000 undergraduates' tuitions by about $21 each. Obviously it doesn't work that way, but that gives you an idea of how vast the University's resources are and, more importantly, how comparatively insignificant its funding of student life is.

84 Sal Gentile is a freshman Public Health and Writing Seminars major. He is the SAC Publications Liason.