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In This Issue

• Club Cash, with Catches
• When Friends "Go Greek"
• Father Christmas Found Dead
• Czech Patriot-Citizen Shot
• Promised Floor, Chosen People
• Best of Times, Worst of Times in Manhattanville
• Borat Movie’s Frat Boys Got Love for Hos
• The New Holy "Trinity"
• Interspecies Tension Outside Low Fuels Vicious War
• Vampire Christ
• Tales of the Inexpressible
• Jew Ruins Christmas, Ramadan Up Next, Kwanzaa Left Alone
• Seas Trek: The Next Generation
• SEAS: Survivor
• Thanksgiving: The Last Supper of the Wampanoags
• CAVA Saves Christmas?
• The Evolution of Ashlee Simpson's Face
• THEY Watch

Andres Vedova

If even a single day passes without me hearing "Columbia's raising so much money, so how come I can't start a club/book a space in Lerner/get hot water in my dorm/have a pony?" I'll eat my hat. That day's gonna have to be Thursday, though, since that's the only day I wear my Koronet's-sponsored "pizza hat." But I'm getting distracted.

Yes, Columbia does have billions of dollars in its goblin-guarded coffers, and it is currently well into a capital campaign to raise billions more. By the same token, the school has to pay its faculty and staff; keep your dorm room either too hot or too cold; maintain PrezBo's immaculate coif; whatever. Indeed, it's certainly the case that Alma Mater can be a callous mistress-the mere act of filing a grievance took former Ph.D candidate Shany Mor into an 18-month battle that shuttled him from committee to committee until he ran out of cash. Way to go, bureaucracy!

With respect to the money, though, there is, believe it or not, a real process governing its disbursement. So how exactly, do student groups get funding? Is it an impenetrably senseless crapshoot or an indiscriminate money cannon?

Naturally, it's hugely complicated-and the answer's irreducibility is a large part of the problem. There are four student-run oversight groups that mete out dollars: ABC (the Activities Board of Columbia), SGB (the Student Governing Board of Earl Hall), SGA (the Student Government Association), and the Inter-Greek Council (Delta Rho Upsilon Nu Kappa). It gets worse: these groups don't have money of their own; funds are divided between them by various administrative bureaucracies.

SGB, which used to be under the  Chaplain's direct control, oversees groups with political, religious, and activist causes. ABC's money comes from the Student Development and Activites office (SDA). SGA handles only Barnard clubs, and the sensibly-named Inter-Greek Council is in charge of fraternities, sororities, and other Greek enterprises that are not Symposium. This is all to say that if a club doesn't want to throw keggers, isn't interested in activism, and is irrelevant to the strong Barnard women, it will be dealing with ABC.

"[There's] a running joke," says Keith Hernandez, CC '07 and ABC's president, "of how forgotten we are unless we do something wrong." Judging from the outcry every time they reject a majority of the clubs seeking recognition, that's a pretty accurate appraisal. ABC's acquired a reputation that one would expect of the stuff of a Soviet apparatchik's wet dream, not a student-run club. What gives?

Well, first, who are they? ABC is a cabal of Scientologists-wait, no, I'm confusing them with The Eye again. ABC is made up of 20 individuals. Thirteen are representatives, each managing various "divisions" of student groups that, while officially unnamed, are fairly easy to label: publications, theatre groups, Asians, etc. There's also an executive board comprising the president (Keith), vice president (Lissy Hu, CC'07), treasurer (Angela Kou, CC'08) and secretary (Allison Fortune, CC'07). The last three members are liaisons from the student councils of CC, SEAS, and GS. Almost all of these people vote on how to give a club funding (or not), and clubs are placed into categories (I or II) denoting their level of funding.

Confused yet? So are many others, but some good could come of that. "I like ABC because it is not under the scrutiny of the Spectator and other outlets," says Keith. With less of the constant yelling that seems to surround everything of importance at Columbia, ABC can avoid the red tape that accompanies publicity and get down to brass tacks. This, however, presents a problem of outreach. "Our job is to know the groups, know Columbia, to know the student population, and make educated decisions based on a huge amount of facts thrown at us," Keith notes, and that's a difficult process for any student group  to master.

While on one hand the lack of constant needling makes tough decisions much easier for ABC's board, it also makes SDA's activities relatively immune to the same sorts of outcries. SGB-remember, they're the kids that deal with politics and religion-are being moved under SDA's jurisdiction, ostensibly to eliminate the redundancy that arises when, say a political group like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) finds itself grandfathered into ABC from an earlier re-organization.

At least, that's what they say the rationale is. But there's more here than meets the eye. SGB authorized the College Republicans' Minuteman event, which brought a torrent of negative publicity down on senior administrators. Remember, they're in the midst of a huge capital campaign, and they're SDA's bosses. Bringing SGB under SDA's auspices creates a nice, thick alphabet soup wherein activist groups can't make controversial decisions without a lot more oversight. It's not comforting.

Their organizational particulars not withstanding, how good a job does ABC do in doling out its money?

First, there are the unending grumblings that the Varsity Show has a license to print money, courtesy of ABC. According to ABC's minutes, the Varsity Show secured a $12,000 loan for this year's production. That seems exorbitant at first glance, but consider the word after the  number: loan. It's not for kicks that the Varsity Show holds seven shows, nor is it to make a capitalist statement that they charge for their tickets. They run something that's foreign to a lot of student groups: a profit. ABC made a decision to give the Varsity Show funding to compete with heavyweights like Harvard's Hasty Pudding Revue, a show which really is funded largely by offshore accounts and terrorism.

And yet, most theatre groups scrounge for handouts from the Chaplain and the CU Arts initiative, and a few resort to tricks like keeping their money under a mattress, for fear that ABC will cut their budgets or seize it for old debts. The message, intended or not, seems clear: go corporate like the V-show, or go home. At a school where community is already hard to come by, this simply isn't an option that groups  devoted  to free performances can entertain. ABC's working hard at outreach at present and has made real positive strides, but even a meeting with existing groups, including the Varsity Show, would be helpful, if only to say "Look, we're here to help you, and we want to give you a hand designing budgets, even if that means going without an expensive Ferris Booth sign that's going to fall during your show anyway."

The second example deals with The Fed's recently resurrected rival, Jester. On October 18th, the magazine was denied emergency funds for their first fall-semester issue. "We want them to prove they have advertising," say the ABC minutes. Jester never got the memo. "We didn't hear from them until three weeks later," said a staff member, "and by then, they said ‘Oh, sorry, we had midterms,' giving us a loan long after we needed it." By ABC's rules, one quarter of a student publication's funding must come from advertisements. Jester had two ads in its last issue: a full page from University Catering and quarter-page from WBAR. To ABC's credit, Jester has since been promoted in categories. And after a recent category re-shuffle, no accepted club will be on the "provisional funding" list. But that tardy provisional loan from October? It'll be taken out of the Jester budget for next year. Nice.

"If you overspend," says Keith, "then ABC goes into debt covering your expenditures, which means our ability to fund groups is weakened." This is clearly not a good thing. But when the Blue and White ran a $5,000 deficit last year, they were awarded an emergency loan and a $12,000 budget for the next year. Granted, that was the year the Blue and White started a major new business expenditure, the Bwog, but it's supposedly both separate and solvent, based on ad revenue. They've also picked up their publishing schedule and increased the size of the magazine.

And yet the emergency committee appointed to deal with the deficit spending of the magazine last year was bypassed, and the magazine was allotted a $4,800 emergency spending package under the strict expectation that it would repay the money at some point, without any plans for how that repayment would come about. No one's gonna deny that the Bwog has made great steps towards fostering some sense of community, and that's worth my money, but maintaining a plan for revenue, be it from ads (one in the November issue, none in the October issue) or coke deals or whatever, would also allow the magazine to operate without fear of having to reduce its publishing schedule. If ABC's dinging Jester for not having ads when the magazine is actually printing at least a couple, what's the harm in protecting ABC's $12,000 investment with a little oversight, instead of digging the hole deeper for a good magazine that's got a lot hanging over its head?

Few people are aware of these budgetary snafus unless they're involved with ABC or find some other reason to slog through the group's minutes. Hell, slogging through this article probably wasn't easy. But there's hope. Thanks to the fact that students are in charge of at least some parts of the allocation process, it is neither a universally haphazard venture nor a giveaway. Believe it or not, many of the kids on ABC are committed to giving clubs a fair shake. They deal directly with administrators, and they fight hard to secure your club's money.

But "not universally haphazard" isn't exactly something I'd want to see on, say, a CULPA review about how a professor assigns grades. There's a conflict between operating under the radar to avoid squabbling and trying to master student outreach. Even something as simple as a short (i.e., not six-hour-long) "this is how your club can get money" presentation would be appreciated. Another idea would be holding groups to account. That means acknowledging that while it is fine to be ambitious and even to go a bit over budget, ABC has an obligation to work with organizations to get debt cleared rather than simply adding to the burden of clubs that are working hard to secure other sources of money.

Editorials on that blighted wasteland of Columbia criticism that is the Spectator's opinion page tend to end with an invective towards some individual or group, be it "Bollinger" or "Health Services" or "your mom" or whatever. That sort of behavior usually winds up getting the same editorial reprinted two years later in a more petulant tone. So instead of telling the mysterious "others" what to do, I'd rather tell you what you can do, if you want, to make ABC, and your extracurricular life, better.

If you're someone with authority in a club, meet with your ABC representative. They're supposed to be representing your interests, and they can tell you how funding meetings work so that you know what to do in advance, instead of being told a few weeks after your club needed the money "Oh, we had midterms." If you're dissatisfied with how you think funds are allocated, or if you want more of a say in the process, run to be an ABC rep. If you'd like to start a club, check out ABC's website and grill them about the process, politely. And if you're an ABC rep, be friendly! Chat with your clubs. A little bit of face time with a fellow student goes a long way toward convincing him or her that you're not "the bad guy," and that'll help clubs see your point of view in the decision-making process. If you wind up in ABC's administration, consider forcefully advertising lessons on how to start a club, how a club gets funded, and the like. Yes, being more public will open you up to the usual moans and groans and requests for ponies, but more transparency on both the money-giving and money-receiving sides will make all our lives easier.

And if you're not in a club yet, why not? There are plenty, with degrees of social interaction ranging from recluse to Facebook whore.  Join one, or start your own. It's a lot easier than it looks. Hell, if The Fed can do it....