Presidential Precedent

The Undergraduate Council’s recent initiative to provide a stipend to its president and vice president has the potential to alleviate a financial impediment to two of the College’s most demanding extracurricular positions. The measure, which received the support of all but two UC members, one of whom abstained from the vote, offers a $1,000 stipend to future UC presidents and vice presidents if they receive financial aid from the College, or $1,500 if they are in the “high financial aid bracket” and pay between zero and 10 percent of tuition. This pilot program’s funding will be drawn from an unused $6,000 of last academic year’s Student Activities Fees, which are term-billed to all students.

This initiative’s aim to make the UC’s presidency and vice presidency financially accessible to all is unequivocally commendable. As its proponents have argued, the measure allows all students to run for these positions without having to balance leadership of the UC with need for part-time employment. Hopefully, this program will increase the socioeconomic diversity of UC presidential and vice presidential candidates, leading to greater representation of the student body in the College’s undergraduate leadership. We believe that financial aid initiatives such as this are instrumental in emulating the College’s socioeconomic diversity within its extracurricular organizations, and we support the UC’s pursuit of this goal.

Nevertheless, we must also side with the measure’s sole dissident in raising questions about the initiative's funding. While the program has the potential to be positive, we strongly encourage the UC to find an alternate source of funding. Students who pay $75 for student activities, which the College allocates to the UC, should rightfully expect their money to be devoted to this cause. The UC’s failure to fully utilize these funds last year should be remedied by earmarking them for student activities this year, no matter how worthy alternatives such as this financial aid initiative may be.

Furthermore, the measure’s funding is as unsustainable as it is questionable, as the $6,000 earmarked for this plan can only subsidize two to three years of UC leadership if the holders of both positions receive the funding. The UC should not intend to withhold future Student Activities funding when its existing resources for this program have been spent, emphasizing the need to fund this program from elsewhere to pursue the initiative’s admirable aspirations.

We understand that the UC requires funding to function, as it is, after all, a student activity. The UC may well determine that it wants to subsidize other demanding extracurricular positions on campus, but until it passes a measure to that effect, there is no reason why it should use students’ and families’ money to make an exception for itself.