U.C.'s Money Machine Works Just Fine

The Finance Committee is the smallest and in many ways most select committee of the Undergraduate Council. Only one representative from each house and Yard region sits on the committee. Its deliberations have been described as secretive, regimented, and detached from the students it is meant to serve.

In contrast to the other two U.C. standing committees--Student Affairs and Campus Life--the Finance Committee meets in a small room in the basement of Canaday Hall, usually into the wee hours of the morning. And although, to my knowledge, none of the current committee members are smokers, the committee has often been likened to the "smoke-filled back rooms" of political infamy.

Invariably, after each biannual U.C. grants approval meeting--at which the final determination of student groups' grant awards it made--groups disgruntled with the process, and often the campus press, call for reform. What the vast majority of these protests have in common is a remarkable level of ignorance regarding the process by which grants are warded. As with many other issues that concern the U.C., a better understanding of the grants process is needed.

The Finance Committee this year has a budget of $83,000. This dwarfs the budgets of the other two committees and represents over two-thirds of student term bill contributions to the U.C. For this reason alone, students need to be better acquainted with what happens with the committee.

Furthermore, students who may never attend a U.C. concert or ride a U.C. shuttle bus are likely to be part of organizations which receive funding from the Finance Committee. The aim of this editorial is to educate these students and explain the process and, in so doing, demonstrate why drastic reform is not necessary and would likely be very harmful.

The Finance Committee was created 12 years ago to give students more of a voice in what happened with their financial contributions to Harvard. Specifically, the Finance Committee is charged with distributing money to the hundreds of student groups which exist on campus. Typically, a committee member will interview one or more members of each group that applies for a grant. There, the committee member will acquire all of the information necessary to make a presentation before the full committee with a recommended grant.

Last semester, 108 groups applied for grants. Each request was debated by the full committee, a process that can take anywhere from a few minutes to over half an hour. For each grant applicant, the committee recommends a grant amount after debate. Groups are notified at the end of this process of their recommended grant.

If dissatisfied with this recommendation, they may attend an amendments meeting a week prior to the final grants approval meeting. At the amendments meeting, student group can make a direct appeal to the committee for more funding. In some cases, the recommendations are revised upward.

Finally, on "Grants," each grant must be individually approved by the full Council. Again, groups still dissatisfied may appeal to the full Council. The grant award is not final until a majority of Council members have approved it. Once the process is completed, the groups may claim their money from the U.C. treasurer on a reimbursement basis.

By and large, this process is not what has aroused controversy. Rather, the source of the friction has been the criteria established by the Finance Committee to determine its grant recommendations, which in a solid majority of cases are ultimately approved by the full Council.

Because of the sheer volume of requests, the committee has established standardized costs for items which turn up regularly on grant applications. For example, postering for any event is $25, and security is $100. The cost of such activities varies, of course. It may be considerably more. But, the U.C. is not intended to be the sole funding source for student groups. In fact, groups are required to solicit funds from other sources of raise them internally.

Because of problems related to verification, the committee does not, as a rule, fund, things like telephone bills, gasoline, utilities, and postage. Activities which exclusively benefit members of student groups are likewise not funded. For instance, a newsletter delivered only in-house will not receive funding.

Activities which take place off the Harvard campus are ordinarily not funded. A major exception is made for community service groups, which by their very nature operate off campus.

A criterion which has often been criticized is the age of a group. Generally, younger groups are given preferential consideration, on the theory that they are most in need of U.C. funding whereas older groups may have established sources of outside or internal revenue. Finally, to remove ideology from the process, the grants process is content-neutral in terms of political ideology, religious of ethnic affiliation, etc.

Let me now address a few of the reforms that have been suggested. First, some students are outraged at U.C. funding for activities they deem frivolous or unworthy in some way. On this page last week, an editorialist decried the U.C.'s funding of the group AFARM (Association for the Absence of Rabid Moralism) because, in his words, AFARM is "a highly politicized group."

What he fails to mention is that last semester the Council awarded a grant to the Alliance for Life. In the past, the Council has also funded Peninsula and AALARM, Understandably, liberal-minded students were upset about this. However, by maintaining its content-neutral stance, the Finance Committee supports the dissemination of a wide variety of views on campus.

Many established groups seeking funding for large events are often disappointed that they do not receive as much funding as they would like and suggest that the age criterion be eliminated. However, by doing so, we would shortchange the younger groups who are more vulnerable without funding. It is important to keep in mind that the older and larger groups were also at one time young and small. We simply owe it to the young groups to give them a fair chance to survive and succeed.

Finally, criticism has been levelled at the committee from within as well as outside of the Council to be more consistent in its recommendations. If one event appears on the surface to be similar to another one, they should receive the same funding, these critics say. But committee members are humans and not robots and should be free to be flexible in the face of the amazing diversity of requests for funding that it receives--no request exactly like any other.

Generally, the Finance, Committee will ask certain basic questions about any grant request. How many Harvard students will it benefit? Does it fill a void in the community? How badly does the group need our support? What potential impact does it have on the Harvard community? With a budget of $83,000 but requests typically exceeding $300,000, these are the tough questions that have to be asked, and cuts necessarily have to be made.

The Finance Committee spends upward of 30 hours in debate alone on grant requests; there is quality control throughout the process. In the end, the committee will not satisfy every group. But the process is fair and the guidelines used are part of the process for good reasons.

Hopefully, students will acquaint themselves with the process even further by going to speak to their representatives in the U.C. office in Canaday B or calling Finance Committee members.

Grant applications for the spring semester can be picked up in the office and are due this Friday, February 18. By learning about the grants process, I am convinced that students will have a greater appreciation for how their money is being put to use.

Jay Kim is chair of the U.C. Finance Committee.