Undressing for Money?

It seems that, according to the Undergraduate Council’s new formula to calculate their redistribution of students’ money, getting your name in the press under headlines containing the words “sex” and “Harvard” will guarantee you privileged funding. As co-founders of Cinematic, Harvard’s first and only magazine dedicated to film, we have been struggling for the past two years to get the magazine on its feet and establish a solid financial grounding for what has become very quickly a major academic reference within and beyond this University. Last year, we found ourselves with a $1,600 deficit that was fortunately overcome by the generous private contributions of our staff and Faculty advisors. As a start-up magazine with an enormous potential to fill an important void in campus life, we were thrilled by a $550 grant from the council. This year, we contently received a $250 one, despite being in dire need of grant funding. We will probably end up coming out even this year, but only after spending an unbelievable amount of time soliciting funding through advertisements, fundraisers and alumni campaigns—time that we could have spent improving the substance of our magazine and increasing its channels of exposure.

And then we suddenly learned that H Bomb, the proposed campus magazine on sex and sexuality, had been awarded a $2,000 grant from the council. We support the mission of this newly-founded publication—but we found it difficult to see the fairness of the grant application process in this case. After inquiring with council representatives, we were given an answer that boiled down to a simple assertion: that H Bomb would have an unusually large impact on an under-examined area of student life. This is true enough, but isn’t it also true of many other projects that have received much less money? Cinematic provides a useful example. The impact it has had on campus has proven in the last year to be unique for a first-year publication: professors are using articles in their class syllabi and students are still referring to it months after it was published. The magazine already has groundings on the web, within the International Standard Serial Number administration and international recognition including a permanent subscription from a Belgian publisher. Cinematic has featured student-written articles next to submissions by people ranging from the producer of The Graduate to a Cannes-awarded Iranian director. All in all, 40 undergraduates and ourselves have been working extremely hard over the last two years to produce a magazine that is competing in quality with the most established publications on this campus and has been described by Bruce L. Jenkins, former curator of the Harvard Film Archive, as “without doubt one of the finest student film publications in this country.”

H Bomb may well deserve a substantial grant, but what of publications with records like the one Cinematic has established in such a short time? The only record H Bomb has established thus far is to make the news—fairly or not—as a University-sponsored “porn” magazine. If Cinematic’s accomplishments are not significant enough for the representatives of the student body at Harvard, while H Bomb garners such disproportionate funds, then we feel extremely frustrated and distanced from the body that is supposed to represent us.

To be clear, we are not asking for an increase in the amount granted to Cinematic; we are very grateful to the council for their help. Our complaint lies with the justification of the relative distribution of funds. All organizations struggle with funding, especially start-ups, and they should all be given fair support. Some definitely have a larger impact than others, but they should all at least be given a chance to accomplish their mission and expand their potential.

H Bomb may well be sold to students and not freely distributed. If the publication is actively read by 4,000 students—the assumption that the council made in its grant evaluation—then one would presume that the sales would bring this publication a significant revenue that would make the exorbitant grant even less justified.

The council is considering a measure to increase the optional $35 student activities fee on the term bill to a mandatory $100 fee, provided a student referendum on this issue passes. But our experiences with council funding, plus a few simple math calculations, have led us to believe that ultimately organizations like our magazine would be better off asking their members to waive the student activities fee and let the students donate that money to the main organizations they are devoted to, and that are in need. At this point, it seems to us that the wisdom of the individual will probably lead to a fairer distribution than what the supposedly collective representation in the council has recently shown.

Raja G. Haddad ’05 and David W. Huebner ’05 are social studies concentrators in Quincy House. They are the founders of Cinematic magazine.