Bruin Diversity Referendum

Although the Bruin Diversity Referendum commendably aims to provide resources for some student organizations and institutional bodies that support campus diversity, its efforts are ultimately misdirected and fail to solve the real funding problem facing its beneficiaries.

For that reason, this board does not endorse the Bruin Diversity Referendum for the special election ballot.

The main funding problem that the referendum’s authors point to is the disparity between the amount of money student groups and other bodies, like the LGBT Center, request from funding sources and the amount of money allocated to them. Almost every group is allocated less money than they request from the major funds available, including the Undergraduate Students Association Contingency Programming Fund and Student Organizations Operational Fund, among others.

But this is not an accurate method for assessing need. Student groups and other beneficiaries of the referendum should be held accountable for the way they’re spending funds to ensure that what they’re requesting is truly what they need.

Many major funds supported by student fees consistently run a surplus at the end of the year. That means that, even while student groups are supposedly getting less and less money each year as funding pools shrink and allocations go down, they are not spending all of their allocations. In the last academic year, about one-third of the student groups that received an allocation from SOOF did not spend any of their money.

This does not mean, of course, that some student groups aren’t still taking a hit from the decreased allocations. But it does mean that the money is not being allocated efficiently.

The answer to the problems that student groups face is not to throw more money into a pot where it will get distributed according to the same allocation model with the same inefficient results. It’s to hold student groups and other beneficiaries accountable for what they request and what they spend, and to base allocations on past expenditures.

This referendum fails to address the problem of student group accountability – it asks for nearly $30 per student per year in student fees to a system that does not accurately assess need.

Moreover, this is not even the referendum that its authors really wanted. The referendum had to be brought forward quickly to make it onto the special election ballot, and the authors had to borrow language from a similar initiative that failed in 2013, the Bruin Diversity Initiative. This last-minute throwing together of the referendum language lends less credibility to the referendum and begs the question of why its authors didn’t wait for spring to propose a better referendum.

Ultimately, the referendum is a messy and inefficient solution to a complex problem, and students should save the fee increase for a referendum that acknowledges the real funding issues that face student groups and other bodies on-campus.