Many students, at some point during their college experience, will listen to a speaker they hadn’t heard of and have their life’s perspective and direction change. Campus speakers are simply a tradition, as much as ultimate frisbee on the quad or late nights in the library. At UNC – Chapel Hill, as at most other major universities, student fees pay for on-campus organizations and events, and the largest portion of these funds goes to organizations to pay for and accommodate various on-campus speaker events. However, according to the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students, “many universities, […], lack transparency and public accountability in regard to fee revenues and expenditures.” For a public university electing to spend large amounts of student fees on campus speaker events, this is quite troubling.
When student organizations at UNC want to obtain funding, they must apply for money either at the end of an academic year for the next year, or at the start of a given semester. After submitting an application, the organization presents to the Finance Committee, a subset of the elected Student Congress. The Finance Committee then makes a recommendation of how much of the request to fill, and the full Student Congress approves this recommendation. When applying for appropriations, organizations must indicate what the money will be used for to argue their case by categorizing it in various classifications. One of those is Speaker Fees, another is Travel and Lodging. This includes providing information regarding who will be coming in to speak, their fees, and the related expenses.
The problem, however, arises during the follow-up portion of this process. For many of the events and programs funded by student money, success and failure is easy to gauge. Did a publication print the expected number of issues? Did a charity event raise a certain amount of money? The success of a speaker event would be determined by attendance, which is indicative of student interest, however Student Congress does not require groups to track and report this data. This often leaves Finance Committee members shooting in the dark when deciding which funding proposals to fill and which to reject for future semesters. According to Priyesh Krishnan, Chair of the Finance Committee, committee members can use personal and anecdotal experience when deciding but because Student Congress doesn’t require any data be reported, members usually have to take an organization’s word about how previous events have fared.
With the amount of money that goes into funding campus speakers, proper reporting of data is essential, and Krishnan knows this. Of all of the categories in which campus organizations request money, speaker fees are usually the highest in terms of total requested as well as total amount granted. Organizations regularly request thousands of dollars to bring in speakers. In some special cases, the costs to host a speaker can become even greater. A couple of years ago, Student Congress granted $10,000 to the Executive Branch to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a Speaker Ban which prevented communists from giving talks at UNC.
The fee charged by the speaker is usually not the only cost associated with holding an event. In order to entice speakers, Student Congress attempts to cover the full travel cost and at least some of the lodging for the speaker. Some speakers have modest speaking fees, but travel from far away and stay for a long enough period of time that just the ancillary costs can become prohibitive.
These costs come straight from the pockets of UNC students. Each undergraduate student at UNC pays $22.50 per semester in student organization fees and each graduate student forks over $12.75. While this entire amount doesn’t go to speakers, it is the largest portion. Because UNC students are footing the bill, it’s crucial that information regarding these events be publicly available and easy to access. This however, is not the case.
Up until the 2015-2016 academic year, there was no attendance reporting mandated by Student Congress for speaker events. This year, for the first time, Krishnan and the Finance Committee decided to require any organization which received more than $2000 in student money for a speaker event to take attendance using card readers provided by the Carolina Union Activities Board (CUAB). These readers could scan the OneCard of any UNC student in attendance and the data would be easily reportable. Because every attempt is made to ensure that speaker events are free for students, this could have been an easy fix, even if it should have been applied to every speaker event.
However, this new initiative has yet to see results. Krishnan says that he hasn’t received any numbers and the data does not have to be reported to the Finance Committee until the organization applies for funding again next year, but perhaps CUAB would have the data. A representative from CUAB then stated that the information couldn’t be disclosed without permission from the organization, but didn’t give a reason for this restriction.
Bobby Kunstman is the Senior Associate Director for Student Life, the umbrella organization under which CUAB operates. He’s been on the job only a few years, but one cause he considers very important is the proper reporting of data for any event that uses student finances and he’s been a strong proponent for the use of card readers at more events. He mentions that the card reader system has been in place for 6 years, making it puzzling why it isn’t used more. Kunstman said, “we’ve got the tools but people don’t know about them.” He says student organizations should be using these readers for every event they have just because they’re so convenient. Right now Student Life has 6 of them, but at the low cost of $20, he’d be more than willing to buy extras if there was demand.
Having speakers on campus is a wonderful opportunity for students to gain new perspectives and potentially see their idols in person. However, without any information about these events being publicly available, it’s impossible to know which speakers are having an impact and which organizations are the most effective at organizing these engagements. With so much student money involved, transparency is a must.
Editoral story written by Parth Majmudar
