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Hey all,

With my spirits recently buoyed by the discovery at dinner tonight that at least some of you read these emails, I’m writing to tell you about a semesterly Bard tradition that’ll come once again tomorrow night [tonight].  This is, of course, Budget Forum, only this time it’ll be like no other Budget Forum you’ve ever seen before.

This year, Budget Forum will take place on the lawn across from Ludlow at 7:00 PM.  Yeah, we’re taking the act outside.  Come and see this old tradition get a shiny new suit.  Also come for cotton candy, sno-cones, and popcorn.

Come early for Club Fair, where every Bard club will be exhibiting their ‘thing’ whatever that may be.  There’ll be singing, dancing, and unclassifiable displays of Bard creativity.  And enjoy an outdoor dinner graciously provided by Chartwells.

If it rains, we’ll be in Kline, but I have our best shamans working on preventing that one.

See you there!

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tAPVvVN_mB9qe0xYFf6GVIA&output=html

The figures have been revised downwards since I composed the piece, but we’re still in the black.  For the time being, anyway.

Remember to sign up for Budget Defense on the sheet on the Student Activities’ office door.  Click ‘Read More’ to, well, you know.

The Peculiar Tale of How We Were but Are No Longer In Debt

Though it may be too late for the person who, upon reading the headline, leapt up onto their table in Kline to perform a celebratory dance, the title does not refer to your college loans.  On that point, we’re still screwed.  Sorry, folks.

The Student Association, however, is in a much better place than you are.  We still don’t have enough money to cover even half of what clubs request, although we’re working on that one, but at least we’re in the black.  This was not always certain, as through most of the summer months we were preparing to deal with a Convocation Fund that was between $20-30,000 in debt.

Actually, based on the assumptions we were operating under at the time, the actual number would have turned out to be $39,595.66, or a little under a third of the semesterly Activities Fee revenue.  It would have been a terrible year, probably involving Student Government working off our arrears through manual labor of some kind.

Fortunately, we now have $2,541.23 in the bank, which will soon be supplemented by the about $130,000 generated by the $70 ‘Student Activities Fees,’ contributed by all of us.

So we have a clean slate and no debt.  Isn’t that great?  Like magic, everything worked out, and my summer stress was for naught.  Well, not quite.  Though we could just thank whatever deities we pray to and move on, this would be to ignore the many problems that got us into this position in the first place.  So I’m going to go through the whole story of how we got into and out of debt.

The origins of the problems date back to 2005, when it was ‘discovered’ that the Student Association had a little over $82,000 in its account. In actuality, we had $115,743.37 in unspent funds, but we didn’t know this at the time.  Though this discovery damaged our reputation for fiscal responsibility* in the eyes of the administration, students rejoiced at the pile of cash that had just fallen into their laps, and we wasted no time spending it.  The semester after learning the news, $50,000 was spent on a costly SMOG expansion.  By the end of Spring 2007, the money was gone.

What was left in its aftermath, however, was the idea that our resources were bottomless. Shortly after the discovery, Planning Committee, always caught between pressure from clubs and a miniscule convocation fund stretched too thin, began to allocate more money than we had, based on the historically accurate assumption that clubs would not spend all that they received.

This, I believe, was a fundamental error of method – instead of attempting to guess the amount clubs wouldn’t spend, Planning Committee should have induced clubs to spend money more efficiently by punishing those clubs that over-requested and reducing their subsequent allocations.  Instead, however, the Committee was effectively making a semesterly gamble on how inefficient clubs would be.

Semester after semester, they guessed wrong, overspending by $6,684.99 in the 05-06 academic year, $4,426.39 in 06-07, $17,181.16 in 07-08, and $12,764.86 in 08-09.  If we had been correct about the size of the Convocation Reserve in 2005, we would currently be about $40,000 in debt.

Here’s where the story turns around.  As it turns out, the Reserve was far larger than anyone had known, about $33,000 than we had been assuming.  We know this now because Kim Henschel, the Assistant Controller who now oversees the Convocation Fund, spent her summer figuring out exactly how much money we had.

The result of her labors is the chart [at left, right, above, below], which depicts the actual amount of money remaining in the Student Association coffers at the end of each of the last five academic years.  At the end of it all, we had a little less than $6,000 in debt.

Yet Kim Henschel, Assistant Controller extraordinaire, did not stop there.  There were also a series of outstanding checks that had never been cashed, which are now believed to have been duplication errors.  By crediting the total of these checks back to us, we gained an additional $8,393.52, bringing us to a final figure of $2,541.23.  Yes, a positive figure at long last.

Though the debt is gone, however, we’ve played our last Get Out of Jail Free card.  Now we have to change course, because we can’t continue to overspend – there just isn’t any more money with which to bail us out.

We can do this by rectifying the mistakes of the past. We will rid Planning Committee of its gambling problem and only spend what we have, focusing our efforts on ensuring clubs efficiently use that money. The emergency fund will again be unallocated money, not money already allocated four or five times over.

We can do this by putting new safeguards in place. The Treasurer and Planning Committee will work to keep a closer eye on where our money is going, and at the recent club head day, we sketched out the details of a new check cutting procedure that will not only make the process more orderly and efficient, but also eliminate cash advances that allow your money to be put to ends that neither you nor us approved.

And finally, this year we will do something that’s been talked about for a while, but has not been done since 1991 – raising the Student Activities Fee. Our fee is less than half that at Vassar, resulting in a Convocation Fund that is ill-equipped to sustain the number and diversity of Bard’s clubs and student organizations.

In the end, we’re back where we started.  This time around, however, we’ve learned from past mistakes, and won’t be repeating them.

*No, we have never, to this point, had such a reputation.  This is something that we’re working very hard to change this year.

If, however, you feel like you’ve been denied the exercise of your democratic rights, I hope you’ll consider being a challenger yourself in an upcoming election in order to avoid this unfortunate outcome.

Treasurer
Mehrab Bakhtiar

Arts Division, EPC
Alex D. Gaudio

Student Senate
Richard Aberle
Ben DiFabbio
Maria Gomez
Qin Ya Guo
Brandon LaBord
Roy Zabludowicz
Puqian ‘Paxton’ Zhou

Student Senate (4 open positions)
What is it?: The Student Senate investigates student views on issues, and ensures that the rest of Student Government is adhering to what students want.
Who can be it?: These positions are open to anyone. One slot is reserved for a first-year candidate.
How do I get it?: Submit a nominating petition with the signatures of twenty-five (25) students to me by Sunday, September 6th at 8pm, as well as a brief statement explaining why you’d make a great Senator.

Arts Division, Educational Policies Committee (2 open positions)
What is it?: The EPC evaluates faculty members up for review, and works to improve academic policies at Bard.
Who can be it?: These positions must be filled by students moderated into the Division of the Arts.
How do I get it?: Submit a brief statement to me by Sunday, September 6th at 8pm, explaining why you’d make a great EPC member.

Want to know how to start a club and get funding? Want to learn how the Student Judiciary Board works? Want to have a say in whether your professors get rehired? Want to be a force for change at Bard? Come and learn more! Refreshments will be served.

Thursday, August 20, 5pm, George Ball Lounge, Campus Center

Something important

Late last week, Ken Cooper from Security sent out a ‘Security Alert’ to the first-year class that pretty strongly discouraged them from voting locally. Professor Jonathan Becker, who coordinates many of the get-out-the-vote efforts at Bard, wrote a response that is worth reposting here in full.

Dear Students:

I am writing to you on behalf of election.bard.edu, which runs many of the election related activities at Bard.

You might have noticed a note from my friend and colleague Ken Cooper on the relationship between jury duty and voter registration. As you will come to see, Ken is the master of the quirky email, for which he has a cult following on campus. However, in this instance I thought it would be helpful to write a follow-up on this subject to provide a bit more context.

First, there is nothing to fear about registering to vote locally or at your parents’
residence. Voting is an important part of civic engagement. Tragically, 18-24 year olds
still had the lowest turnout of any major age group in the 2008 elections, coming in at
less than 50%. Turnout for state and local elections is far lower.

Second, the prospect of jury duty does not merit a security alert. As a political science
professor, I would be loath to dissuade someone from jury duty whether at home or in
Dutchess County. Jury duty is a responsibility of citizenship, just as is voting. It can
be educational and fun (and you are paid). Should you be unavailable at the time you are
called because you are out of town, or if you are called at a particularly difficult
time, most judges will allow you to defer your duty. The important point, as Ken points
out, is that you respond to any jury summons you receive.

As to the link between registration and jury duty, it remains a little unclear. It may be
true that the voter registration lists contribute to the pool of potential jurors, but
logic says that if this is the case that you will be called somewhere, whether here or at
your parents’ residence. Moreover, in the nine years of registering to vote people
locally, I am aware of only one Bard student who has been called to duty, and he was from
Red Hook (and, as it turns out, was released from duty due to the demands of his classes).

My bigger fear, although I am absolutely certain that this was not Ken’s intent, is that
specter of jury duty as some punitive consequence for those who register to vote fits in
with a broader pattern of voter suppression. It is an unfortunate fact that in the United
States there is a long history of voter suppression. Various means have been used, such
as poll taxes, literacy tests, and aggressive challenges at voting stations, to dissuade
select groups (minorities, poor, the young) from registering and/or voting.

Student voting has fallen into this pattern. Indeed, Bard students were systematically
denied their right to vote locally until nine years ago, when threats of litigation (and
the timely conviction of a local elections official on an unassociated felony) opened up
the possibility of local registration. During this year’s special Congressional election,
local party officials aggressively (and incorrectly) challenged Bard students at the
local polling station before being shut down. In spite of this, many students chose to
vote and now have the knowledge that they might have had an impact on the country’s first
post-Obama Congressional election, which was won by a handful of votes.

The important point is this: as first year students have already been told, they have the
right to register to vote locally or at their parents’ residence. There are potential
advantages to both. The important thing is that they register, educate themselves, and
vote (or chose not to based on a reasoned consideration), wherever they register. They
should not be dissuaded because of threats. They should also feel confident that the
college will aggressively see to it that their democratic rights are protected.

Welcome to Bard, good luck and good voting.

Jonathan Becker
Associate Professor of Political Studies
Associate Dean of the College
jbecker@bard.edu
election.bard.edu

I’m currently sitting in BARC: the Bard Academic Resources Center. Maybe your professor has mentioned us in class, or maybe not, but BARC is a great place to get help on any assignment you have during L&T and after. Not only can you come in with an essay to be looked at, but we (the so-called peer tutors) are happy to help you during any stage of the writing process, whether it’s generating ideas or questions, trying to figure out how to structure your essay, or perfecting a near-finished draft.

The one thing we won’t do is edit or proofread your work for you. But we can help you if you’re having difficulty with grammar or the like.

Even if you’re having no difficulties (although if writing is difficulty-free, you’re in a small minority), we can help make your good writing even better. Despite being a tutor myself, I’ve benefited from working with other tutors at BARC.

The schedule for the weeks ahead looks something like this:

August 13: 7-9pm.
August 16: 3-6pm and 7-9pm.
August 17-20: 7-9pm
August 22nd: 7-9pm
August 23: 3-6pm and 7-9pm
August 24 and 25:7-9pm