With University President Lawrence Bacow's office no longer able to provide student groups with co-sponsorship funds, the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate has stepped in to fill the void.
Senators earlier this month allocated an additional $25,000 for this fiscal year to supplement student programming, bringing their total co-sponsorship funding to $27,000. The remaining $2,000 comes from money they had earmarked last year.
"President Bacow approached me a month or so ago and said that he wasn't going to be able to offer co-sponsorship to student groups because he's putting all of that money toward the financial aid budget," TCU President Duncan Pickard said.
TCU Treasurer Matt Shapanka spearheaded the initiative to use Senate money that would roughly match Bacow's yearly aid.
"The goal was to give the same amount of support or even more support than the president gave in the past," Pickard said.
Senators have already dispersed all but $2,075 of the $27,000 and currently have no plans to make more money available this fiscal year. Shapanka said that senators expected the quick turnaround because most groups that usually received money from Bacow's office turned to the Senate en masse.
"Some of those big events that were already sponsored by the president's office in the past came up very quickly," he said. "And we anticipated that."
Examples include a number of culture shows and the annual Emerging Black Leaders Symposium.
Still, a few unexpected expenditures have cropped up, including a $7,500 allocation for the recent Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) symposium.
Senators have drawn the extra co-sponsorship funds from the Student Activities Fee. When they made their initial allocations to groups last year, they distributed money based on the expectation that the incoming freshman class would be smaller than the one that actually materialized.
As a result, they anticipated fewer contributors to the activities pool and a smaller overall pot. The actual number of students who paid the fee left the group with around $50,000 in extra money to disperse. Senators have since divided that surplus evenly between buffer funding and co-sponsorship.
According to TCU Senator Sam Wallis, a sophomore, the Senate's new role as a co-sponsor has preempted the need to reduce programming across campus.
"If the president's office had cut funding and we didn't have the funds to make that up, I think we would have seen a significant decrease in student programming," he said.
In the past, Senate co-sponsorship has been more of a symbol than a financial crutch. Senators used to offer small amounts of as little as $50 to student groups as a token of their support and to increase campus-wide awareness of events. The recent surge of co-sponsorship, however, has an entirely different purpose.
The Senate's intervention is essentially a bailout for student activities in the red. "This new co-sponsorship is for financial support," Wallis said. "We've been giving much larger sums of money."
Co-sponsorship differs significantly from buffer funding in that it is not limited to TCU-recognized groups.
"It was meant more as a way to save a lot of the programming that would have suffered on campus because the president's office was not in a situation to give its typical support," TCU Senator Aaron Bartel, a freshman, said. "It was a way to support those activities that would have otherwise fallen through."
Bartel added that senators view the increased co-sponsorship funds as a temporary solution and hope that Bacow's office will eventually resume its contributions.
Still, Michael Baenen, Bacow's chief of staff, said that at least in the short term, the Senate is in a better position than the president's office to contribute co-sponsorship money.
"We knew that budgets in the central administration would be constrained this year," he said in an e-mail.
Shapanka said that senators have not yet decided on how much to allocate for next year, but they will likely start with their typical $2,000 and increase funding as needed.
"If there's some kind of need, we may be able to do it," he said.
Rob Silverblatt contributed reporting to this article.
