Word: fees
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Over the past few weeks, fee hike proponents have circulated a sexy (though misleading) figure that suggests that this year’s council has only funded 38 percent of student groups’ total grant requests. A closer examination, provided by a recent analysis of four grants packages authored by FiCom chair Teo P. Nicolais ’06 (himself a proponent of the fee hike), reveals that the council in fact funds nearly 70 percent of all applicants that request less than $750. These applications account for the vast majority (86 percent) of all grant requests. These numbers...
Beyond grants packages, the fee increase would fund more council-sponsored activities. Yet in the unending quest for a better social life, the council has rarely considered the possibility that many of its projects do remarkably little to enhance students’ quality of life. Some successful projects, like One Dollar Movie Nights, only require council funding if corporate sponsorship can’t be found—which is unlikely. Other events, like the unpopular yet enduring Fallfest, which cost $11,000 last year, remain as edifices to the council’s disconnect with students. And some projects...
...sustained attention of Harvard undergraduates. It is disturbing that not once in the campaign of council President Matthew W. Mahan ’05 was the potential increase mentioned. Either it was a proposal hastily conceived only months ago, which would explain the arbitrariness of the proposed $75 fee, or the council has hoped to take a quieted approach to it, so as not to draw true scrutiny...
Although a “no” vote on the proposed increase should eclipse most discussion of whether to make the fee mandatory, we also encourage students to vote to keep the fee optional. Such a situation allows students to make up their own minds on the council’s effectiveness and whether they would have their money go to fund projects or groups they have no desire to sponsor...
Even if students vote down the increase—a vote that the council has, in a recent reversal, promised to take as binding—representatives will still have the option of increasing fees in a much more responsible way, to account for past years’ inflation. The architect of the amendment that made the present referendum binding, Joshua A. Barro ’05, estimates that a fee increase to account for past years’ inflation would represent a justifiable and modest 12 percent increase, to about $42. This is exactly the type of modest increase...