Show Me The Money

The Undergraduate Council (UC) has used sleight-of-hand to fund its confrontation with the Harvard College Dean’s Office. And it’s getting away with it.

In the midst of the high-flying rhetoric and masturbatory manoeuvring of the last two weeks, the UC has achieved a most alarming feat of alchemy. In spite of its funds’ being “frozen” by the College, it has continued to fund parties and student group events as if nothing has happened.

The UC’s bank balance is $63,791.21. But after the UC defied administrative edict and ploughed on with its quasi-legal party grant system last week, the College announced that it would not disburse the funds normally earmarked for the UC, meaning that what would otherwise be the first installment of the UC’s budget for this fiscal year remains in some locked drawer in University Hall, not in the UC’s bank account. Where, then, did the $63,791.21 come from? On Sunday evening, Treasurer Anthony R. Britt ’10 told the UC that the balance is, in fact, buried treasure, left over from last year’s budget. His explanation satisfied our ever-watchful UC representatives. It shouldn’t have.

The UC constantly claims that its yearly budget is insufficient to adequately fund all of Harvard’s 390 student organizations. On this page last March, for instance, former UC Finance Committee Chair Lori M. Adelman ’08, who had concluded her term as Chair the previous fall, wrote that “the UC’s grants fund is broke. Of the $285,000 it originally designated for student group funding, the UC has about $28,000 left.” This, with three months remaining in the 2006-2007 academic year, and a backlog of grant requests remaining to be denied. At the end of last semester, with this poverty as its pretence, the UC turned down dozens of proposals from student groups, and even voted down a proposal to provide House dining halls with free copies of The New York Times, which would have cost a whopping $1,728.

Yet after so earnestly professing its insolvency, the UC is suddenly rich. This suggests that either the Harvard University Employees Credit Union is paying some suspiciously generous interest on its savings accounts, or else something is seriously amiss with the UC’s finances.

When undergraduates pay their $75 student activities fee each year, they do so under the assumption that the money will be spent on their activities, not saved for a rainy day. And even if the UC were within its rights to pinch pennies, it’s difficult to imagine what exactly a $63,791.21 rainy day would look like. Perhaps, the UC’s bean-counters will argue, this month’s showdown with University Hall is exactly the sort of cataclysm that savings ought to provide for.

But will $63,791.21 buy the UC its financial autonomy from the administration? Not a chance. The amount is too much for a rainy day, and too little for a hurricane. Even if innocent clerical errors, late deposits from University Hall, and the UC’s emergency reserves are taken into account, there remain tens of thousands of dollars that ought to have been spent that were not. The miraculous shortfall-turned-windfall is almost certainly produced by a blend incompetence and unwarranted over-cautiousness, and not prescience, on the UC’s part.

Last year, the UC began funding events in advance, based on budget estimates from student groups. Some of these pizza parties and happy hours are bound to come in under budget, leaving a little cash left over in the UC’s coffers. Other groups never file “completed project forms” with the UC’s Finance Committee, so their grant checks are never written. Still other checks go un-cashed. But if some groups are denied funding because other groups never actually claim their cash, then the UC’s budget is not adequately serving students. When club sports are denied funding across the board and grant applicants are rebuffed because of an alleged want of funds, the UC is obligated to ensure that the shortfall actually exists. And when the leftovers add up to more than 10 percent of the UC’s entire budget, something is very, very wrong.

Either the mechanism for funding student groups massively miscalculates the amount that they actually require, or else the UC is really, really bad at handling a balance sheet. Or both.

It is more than a little ironic that the UC is surviving on the ill-gotten gains of its past fiscal mismanagement while fighting—with much fanfare—the College’s demands that it better audit its finances. And it is inexcusable that, at last Sunday’s UC meeting, the UC entered “executive session” when its bank balance was up for discussion, closing the proceedings to non-UC members and the media. (The minutes from that executive session were subsequently made public.)

In fighting the administration during the past few weeks, the UC has repeatedly asserted its unmitigated right to spend “students’ money” however it wishes. That it has simultaneously demonstrated just how undeserving it is of both our trust and “our” money is more than just astounding, it’s pathetic.

Adam Goldenberg ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. He is former Parliamentarian of the Undergraduate Council.