Smart Alec | Thinking past the crisis

Past leaders of the Student Activities Council are responsible for the over-budgeting crisis, but they should receive little of its blame. They sinned for the best of reasons — they loved too much in a loveless world.

SAC attempted to create that better world for student activities without the money to pay for it. Penn President Amy Gutmann should increase the general fee — which students pay in addition to tuition — to give SAC the resources to pay fully for our least-funded academic division — student life.

Make no mistake. SAC at its most generous does not meet the real need of the groups it funds. It’s not just that groups requested $1.2 million of SAC’s $900,000 allocation; everyone asks for as much as they think they get. Even the most outlandish requests are limited by SAC’s “guidelines.” Community service groups receive a maximum of $200 for local travel (that’s about 100 trips on SEPTA, which divided by 10 people means 10 trips a year). Competitive groups only receive 60 percent of the funding they need to compete. Food, the biggest expense of any student group, receives no subsidy at all. And, of course, this does not include non-SAC groups, including fraternities and sororities, which must pay for themselves.

The result of all this austerity is dues — often of several hundred dollars — whether your group gets University funding or not. Sports clubs collectively receive the largest SAC allocation, but must nonetheless require as much as $100 from their members at a minimum to stay solvent. Other groups have followed suit. So though we spend $3,300 a year on general fees, we may spend half as much again paying for the rest of our university life. This is the total cost of ownership of being a Penn undergraduate.

Such has always been the case, but we have reached the end of this road for two reasons. The first and simpler reason is that Gutmann has launched Penn on a path to a socio-economically diverse student body. The introduction of students who cannot easily pay the dues and out-of-pocket costs associated with Penn will only make this problem more pressing — the general fee is covered by Penn if you have enough need, but dues for your group are not. Even over-assessing the cost of Penn, as the financial-aid office does, will not give students the ability to cover escalating costs of being a Penn student.

The second reason is that, just as we come to understand that the divisions between many academic disciplines are false ones, so we must break down the mental barrier between the core of the college education and what educators have labeled “extracurriculars.”

We accept the principle of a four-year full-time residential education at Penn because we appreciate that the classroom, the paper and the exam are not enough to educate officeholders or citizens. The "realm where new and unorthodox ideas are judged on their intellectual merits,” in the words of one scholar of democratic education, is not just the academic department. The business of the academy goes on at the iNtuitons performance of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest set in a forced labor camp, the teamwork of the club lacrosse players at a national championship and the democratic deliberation of a student committee. A liberal-arts education is not merely about taking a mixture of classes; it must embrace multiple environments, not just multiple disciplines. Extracurriculars are not luxuries. They are what make Penn worthwhile.

Our courses and our professors are fully funded by our fees. The balance of our education is not. SAC’s aspiration to correct this imbalance on its own was laudable, if reckless. But its crisis is a perfect opportunity. To fulfill her Penn Compact by increasing access, and fully realizing her vision of a wholistic higher education for democracy, Gutmann should increase fees to fully fund student life.

Alec Webley is a College senior and former chairman of the Undergraduate Assembly. His e-mail address is webley@theDP.com. Smart Alec appears every Thursday.

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