Aaah, Spring, the season of rebirth. Birds chirp, flowers bloom and the Associated Student Government becomes important.
I’m not talking about last week’s elections. As much as we all love them, elections don’t directly affect us students at all. Sure, it’s important that the people who are representing our needs are the best candidates for the jobs, but in the end they only have as much power as administrators let them have.
What I’m talking about is spring funding. Every April, the 12 members of the Student Activities Finance Board lock themselves in small rooms in Norris University Center and decide the fate of student group programming for the next 12 months.
Led by Financial Vice President Le’Jamiel Goodall, SAFB presented its recommendations for student group funding to Senate on Wednesday, and this week Senate will begin giving additional funds to a few select groups.
It’s NU’s only form of student self-governance, and it works. (It’s only fair to say that former Financial Vice President Carson Kuo is my roommate.) Students pay the activity fee, students decide who gets what and then students spend it for programs students enjoy. SAFB members spend about 80 hours during a two-week period mulling over funding applications before making their recommendations.
SAFB has done so well in the past few years that ASG and NU’s Board of Trustees decided to give the group even more power. In the past three months, SAFB has gotten an extra $150,000 to dole out and new rights that make the group, and Goodall in particular, the most powerful students on campus.
But as good as SAFB is, it doesn’t deserve the extra authority. The new measures put the group in complete control of A-status groups and the Student Activities Fee, and group members aren’t held accountable by any campuswide election.
SAFB’s extra money comes from two sources: the activities fee increase and new legislation. As recently as 10 years ago, that fee was $24 a year. Since then, it has increased five-fold to $120 a year. On top of that, ASG quietly passed an ordinance in the winter that dropped the amount of money the Senate can add to SAFB recommendations from 10 percent of the pool to 5 percent.
That leaves only about $45,000 for Senate to dole out to groups such as Women’s Coalition and OASIS, which were overlooked by SAFB.
But cash isn’t the only leverage point SAFB holds over student groups. Thanks to an amendment passed in the winter, SAFB usurped the Executive Committee’s powers. Goodall now gets input into which groups are allowed to apply for funding. And after SAFB doles out the funds, it’s Goodall and his committee who work with the groups to make sure the events go off smoothly. It’s that kind of consolidation of accounting and consulting that got Arthur Andersen into a lot of trouble with the Enron fiasco.
The biggest problem with all of this is accountability – SAFB has none. Goodall is elected by the Senate, not the student body, and therefore doesn’t have to answer directly to students. Goodall’s only accountability to the campus is via pressure from the community.
Goodall is a good and capable man, but he’s been given too much power. The power won’t corrupt him, but it might eventually corrupt the system.
Remember, this is self-governance, and governance is based on checks and balances. Right now, SAFB is a tyrant.
