SFC Article Not Balanced

To the Editors:

As both a member of the Student Finance Committee and a student who is feverishly committed to protecting the rights of students against any impending barrage of administrative shadiness, I was both disappointed and distressed by the article which appeared, or rather, didn’t appear in last week’s issue of the Review. In case you missed it: four paragraphs which scathingly portrayed the SFC as a group of money hording bastards who chuckle at the notion that students should be able to spend money on the things that students like to do. The information printed in the article was unbalanced and oversimplified. The coverage of the near half-million-dollar disbursement of the student activity fee was summed up in less space than your average Review comic and in one-fourth of the space that was devoted to chalking sidewalks two weeks ago.
The SFC article quoted a disgruntled Oberlin Film Series co-chair complaining that they could only show 65 of the 85 requested films. What the article didn’t quote was the number of students who have left their rooms to tromp down to see an advertised OFS film only to find the door locked and no indication that anything was ever scheduled, except for the 50 students milling about wondering if they’ve got their days mixed up. What the article didn’t quote was that the OFS arbitrarily decided to pay its chair. Do class presidents get paid? No. Do members of SFC get paid? No. Do EXCO teachers get paid? No. Do OFS chairs get paid? Um. No.
Oberlin Action Against Prisons was upset that they weren’t allocated $12,000 to bring Angela Davis to Oberlin. And rightly so. I’m upset that my class council couldn’t get the whole half a million to have Sarah McLachlan and Dido perform a duet while mud wrestling naked in Wilder Main. It’s not that SFC doesn’t value the OAAP conference or their drive to bring an activist to this campus. It’s that SFC does not have the means to pay anyone $12,000 for a single speaking engagement. And when you consider that 12K amounts to $4 per Obie, the decision becomes even more clear. If given the option, would every Obie pay $4 to hear Angela Davis speak? And the list goes on.
I could defend every single line of every single budget I’ve considered. And even budgets that I haven’t. Show me a copy of any budget that’s ever been reviewed by the SFC and I can probably explain exactly why things have been rejected or removed. Contrary to popular belief, allocations by the SFC are not arbitrary. They are in fact, relatively standard. Hence the “Standard Allocations” sheet which all treasurers get. If they bother to read it, they can see that SFC only provides 35% of the cost of a speaker up to $535. When organizations ignore that information, they are bound to be disappointed. If they hold that sheet up to the budget they’ve just gotten back, covered in red ink, they’ll begin to see some method to the madness.
Allocations are also not biased. Nor are they fun. There is perhaps nothing more tedious than facing a group of your friends and telling them that you can barely give them a third of the money they’ve requested. Do we make judgement calls about the events organizations are planning to throw? No. Do we underfund events because we don’t plan to go to them and are relatively sure no one else will? No. That’s not our job.
Our job is to make the $170 student activity fee each student pays go as far as humanly possible. With that in mind, you can be upset that SFC wouldn’t give you the money to buy your organization an iBook. Or you can acknowledge that maybe you just thought it would be cool to have a free iBook that you as an organizational liaison could play with. And maybe you could further acknowledge that other student organizations have goals as lofty and worthwhile as your own. And that sometimes you have to share, even when it means giving up something you really really want.

–Chris Anton
College senior