Recently the Argus published an article that addressed the practices of the Student Budget Committee (SBC) (“SBC tightens funding for student activities,” Feb. 19, vol. CXLIII, no. 30). I have taken issue with the article because it presented an incomplete and thus unfair depiction of the SBC. By relying on choice statistics and lacking proper analysis, the article wrongly presented the SBC as more stingy despite having a larger budget.
To begin with an example, the article stated that, “last semester, student groups received only 80 percent of the funding that they asked for,” implying that something entitles student groups to more than 80 percent (on average) of what they ask for. The article failed to explain that often student groups do not receive funding because their requests are, quite frankly, inappropriate. When a program house comes to the SBC and requests funding to buy cable television for their house, as one did, the request gets denied because the student activities budget is clearly not supposed to finance that. If one looks at the student groups that come to the SBC looking for money for events and projects that benefit the greater Wesleyan community, one will find that the SBC has tirelessly sought to make these projects work. In the aggregate, statistics such as those used in the article are too far removed from actual stories, and one must regard them with a questioning eye instead of presenting them as if they are relevant standing alone. The article made specific mention of the allocation that was made to WESU, which was thousands of dollars smaller than that of the previous year. Again, the article missed the actual story, which was that $7,000 of the allocation request was meant to finance a weekend trip for a small handful of students to go to New York. It was this segment of the proposal that was denied and accounted for the bulk of their purported underfunding.
The article also featured a table at its conclusion that contained some eyebrow-raising figures, and once again, a proper analysis of the table was not provided. For example, the table indicated that the Chinese Culture Club (CCC) received only $435 of the $5,089 that they requested in the fall. The missing story is that the CCC came with a yearlong budget proposal and was politely told that the SBC allocates on an event-by-event basis, and that yearlong budgets are pre-allocated only for a few big-ticket student groups such as The Argus and WESU. For a reason unbeknownst to me, the CCC never came back as we expected and hoped that they would, and the resulting statistic is that they received a mere 8.5 percent of their requested funds. The unexplained figures of the table in The Argus fail to capture reality and make the SBC look unfair and ruthless.
I will allow myself to believe that the intention of the article was not to attack the SBC. But then it seems that carelessness has executed the attack anyway. It seems appropriate that an article that will undoubtedly keep people talking for days should have done more than a single day of fact-finding itself. I understand that The Argus is just doing its job, but so are we. The SBC is unfalteringly committed to helping student groups secure financial support, and that will never change.
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