By The Gettysburgian Editorial Board
THE ISSUE: Last week, the Gettysburg College Student Senate allotted $2,000 to the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) to host a Military Ball next weekend. $1,800 of that money is to pay for meals for 60 students (framed in the budget request as “30 Gettysburg Cadets and Dates”), and the remaining $200 is to contribute to renting the ballroom at the Gettysburg Hotel. Although the Senate’s Budget Management Committee recommended not funding the event, noting a provision in the bylaws that Senate-funded events must be “open to the entirety of campus,” the Senate opted to fund it in full after a presentation from ROTC representative Kurtis Grey ’21, who argued that there is precedent for Senate to fund events such as conferences that restrict participation so long as the entire campus community has the opportunity to be considered for participation.
OUR VIEW: We’re not anti-ball. We’re not anti-ROTC. In fact, we think the idea of the ROTC having a ball to celebrate its accomplishments and to bid its graduating members best wishes before beginning their military service to be entirely appropriate, and, potentially, a worthwhile use of Senate funds. Unfortunately, a fiasco of the Senate’s own making last Monday likely means we will never know for sure.
Student Senate is entrusted with an annual budget of more than $90,000 to support programming and activities that enrich the student experience for the entire campus community. The students of Gettysburg College elect representatives to the Senate, trusting that they will zealously guard those funds and put them to their intended use.
When any club comes asking for money, they should have their facts together, and the Senate should thoroughly vet each request to make sure that procedures have been followed. Here, we know that, of the 60 slots available to students, 30 went to ROTC members, some number less than 30 have already been distributed to ROTC members’ guests (each member is allowed one guest, Grey said), and the remainder are available to the campus community. Members’ guests ostensibly have no preferential access to tickets, but, if that were the case, there would be no reason to restrict each cadet to one guest as all potential guests would be in the same pool as the rest of campus. Instead, it seems pretty obvious that the 60 tickets are entirely — or almost entirely — for ROTC cadets and their one guest each. If there were evidence to the contrary, Grey should have come to the Senate with that information or, perhaps, ROTC should have just budgeted for there to be 70 total slots — 30 for members, 30 for their guests, and 10 reserved for the general student populace. At least that would have had a measure of transparency.
But why would any club bother to be transparent or rigorous in its funding application if the Senate isn’t going to bother to enforce its own rules? The Senate paid no heed to its own Budget Management Committee, which identified each of the aforementioned problems about who was to be able to come, whether the event was truly advertised such that the general campus community would actually be included, and how the tickets were to be distributed. Senate Treasurer Giacomo Coppola ’22 was direct in outlining his committee’s reservations to the Senate. “If the process itself isn’t equal, then the event isn’t inclusive,” he said.
Inclusivity apparently was not a priority. Senators did not demand information about to whom tickets had been allocated, willing to accept an “I can get that information to you” without actually requiring that they get the information before allocating the funds. Instead, the Senate was content to allocate more than 2 percent of its annual budget on a promise to “get that information to you” that everyone in the room knew would never be fulfilled.
It is the latest in a long line of examples of the Senate doling out funds without any meaningful accountability. Senate rules require clubs to submit event reflection forms after Senate-funded events, and we hope that ROTC’s reflection will delineate how many members, how many of their guests, and how many members of the general student populace attended. But even if they do, no one will have any way of knowing as those forms are not released to the public.
The bottom line is that the Senate abdicated its responsibility to ask pertinent questions before allocating funds. It did so without transparency of its own, following its traditional practice of eschewing roll call votes that would put senators on the record and instead using voice votes that allow everyone to duck accountability to their constituents, hiding behind the appearance of an ostensible consensus. In this case, a cursory listen to the recording would detect at least a handful of “no” votes, but we’ll never know from whom.
Finally, we would be remiss not to note that, even if senators did not see fit to demand answers before allocating funds, Student Senate President Patrick McKenna ’20 had the opportunity to do so himself by vetoing the budget until further information could be obtained, and, similarly, he chose not to. McKenna has cast himself as an institutionalist, someone who wants to leave the Senate in a strong position to be a hub of student activity well into the future. In an October interview, he affirmed the importance of “accountable budgeting.” Both are important goals.
But such institutional leadership requires standing on principle — for example, that Student Senate requires more than mere vague promises that an event is actually inclusive to the entirety of campus — even if that means standing alone. There is precedent for presidents vetoing budgets, even those that pass with strong majorities. In 2018, then Senate President Luke Frigon ’18 vetoed a budget that passed with a more-than-two-thirds majority because he believed the Senate had not had a sufficient conversation on the matter.
In this case, McKenna is savvy enough to know that a presidential veto is not a death sentence and that ROTC could have returned to the Senate with the necessary information at a later date and received its funding then. Doing so would have sent a message that the Senate is a serious organization that requires some basic accounting procedures and an articulable understanding from a club representative as to how a Senate-funded event is supposed to work.
In the end, only the Budget Management Committee made an effort to leave the institution of the Senate in a stronger position than they found it. No current member of the Senate is at fault for accountability and transparency being absent from the body’s budget allocation procedures, but each missed an opportunity to move the body in a positive direction. It is crucial that students have a voice in how money for student programming is allocated, but it is equally crucial that the body charged with that responsibility follow its own guidelines about event inclusivity, make transparent decisions that put senators on the record, and require funding petitioners to bring relevant facts to the table before allocating funds. If that can’t happen, students ought to demand a different mechanism to allot funds meant to support inclusive campus programming.
This editorial reflects the collective opinion of The Gettysburgian’s editorial board, which is led by Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Pontz and Opinions Editor Emily Dalgleish. News staff members regularly involved in covering Senate — including Managing Editor Gauri Mangala, who covered the meeting in question — did not participate in the development of this piece. Questions or concerns may be directed to editors@gettysburgian.com.
