F@CU Pledges Transparency, Sort Of

I was thrilled—thrilled I say!—to pick up today’s Spectator and spot the A1 headline “Funding Committee Opens Discussions to CU Students.” Bucking the popular trend of trying to keep council proceedings off the record, it seemed, the Funding at Columbia University Committee had wisely elected to make next Thursday’s hearings public. Briefly, for those of you not familiar with what the f@ck F@CU is, the article explains:

Every year the FaCU Committee, composed of the incoming and outgoing presidents and treasurers of each student council, convene during reading week in May to hear presentations from the five governing boards and decide on the appropriate amount of funds to allocate to each.

In the past, this process has been criticized (particularly by members of the Student Governing Board) as being opaque, so it was refreshing to read this:

Following a decision by the four undergraduate student councils last night, the meetings in which the councils allocate undergraduate student life fees to club governing boards will now be open to the public.

As part of an effort to make the Funding at Columbia University Committee’s deliberations more transparent and hold members accountable, the councils worked with club boards and voted to allow students to quietly observe the decision-making process.

Huzzah! Another triumph for the freedom of information! Well, kind of. Read the fine print after the jump.

The article continues:

“Observers are there to be silent observers,” the e-mail [to the governing boards] stated. “If any individual speaks out repeatedly or tries to influence the outcome of the meeting, ALL observers will be asked to leave.”

So if one frustrated observer keeps piping up in the middle of the deliberations, the committee will clear the whole room—club presidents, reporter(s), and all? That’s eerily reminiscent of my fourth grade teacher who used to cancel recess for the whole class just because that one kid in the back couldn’t keep his mouth shut. (By that token, maybe Spec should start attributing embarrassing quotes by individual council members to the whole council?) The email continues:

“Observers must come for the entirety of a discussion, i.e. if someone wants to watch the CI [Community Impact] discussion, they have to stay for the entire CI discussion, not just part of it.”

I appreciate the idea behind this—decisions and quotations are best understood in their full context—but it seems awfully heavy-handed. F@CU is an 8-10 hour process, divvied up into individual sessions for each of the governing boards. Forcing students to stay for an entire segment seems a) likely to drive away potential observers and b) gratuitous, given that the whole process is (I’m told) going to be videotaped for eventual public consumption. Plus, is the committee really going to block the door if someone gets up to leave midway through a session? Then:

Additionally, the meetings will be open to the media, but numbers must be approved by the entire council before being printed.

So the committee dictates that campus media can attend, but before they publish any numbers (which basically comprise the entire substance of the meeting), they first have to gain approval from the councils? I can definitely understand the F@CU committee’s interest in maintaining accuracy, but this tactic pretty well eviscerates its claims to transparency.

First, Spec (Bwog, CTV, etc.) reporters happen to be Columbia students, too. As such, if there’s a public meeting on campus, they’re entitled to attend it like any other student—the fact that they write for a newspaper or blog doesn’t compromise that right. And just as the committee can’t selectively exclude reporters from a meeting, it also can’t tell them what to do with the information they obtain there. If the committee tries to pull this trick, F@CU ceases to be an open proceeding.

Note that there’s a history of this in student council politics. Back in 2006, when I used to cover Columbia College Student Council meetings (likewise dubbed “public”), council members regularly prefaced comments with, “This is off the record, but…” At the time, I was too meek to object to this practice, but I eventually came to realize how silly it was. The council members weren’t reciting launch codes or talking about troop movements—they were discussing fairly mundane student council business. Instead, council members often treated the “off the record” tag as a way to state opinions or report private information without being held accountable. This is pretty underhanded: if an organization is going to tout its transparency because it holds “public” meetings, they need to be genuinely public, not selectively so. (Non-reporters in the audience were held to no such gag rule.)

More importantly, the entire point of opening F@CU is to help students understand how funding decisions are reached, and if the committee dictates that Spec, Bwog, etc. aren’t allowed to report any numbers from the deliberation until they’re officially approved, how is that purpose served? (Last year, as I recall, the final numbers weren’t released until weeks after the F@CU meeting.) Yes, media outlets have a responsibility to be accurate in their reporting, and yes, they need to be cautious not to present preliminary figures as if they’re official. But timely coverage of F@CU is critical for bringing accountability to the committee’s decision-making process, and requiring reporters to await council approval before printing them is tantamount to media censorship. (Also, unless they’re planning to have every person who walks into the room sign a non-disclosure agreement, there are zero grounds for saying ‘only Columbia students who happen to be reporters’ have to keep their mouths shut.)

In short, I would encourage Spec, Bwog, and anyone else planning to cover F@CU to willfully ignore (update: or attempt to renegotiate) this restriction—it’s both ridiculous and beyond the authority of the committee. (Who knows? Maybe the Commentariat will stop by.) I’m glad that F@CU is making strides toward transparency, but as the board that holds the purse strings of Columbia’s entire club funding system, it needs to go further. The committee’s deliberations ought to be completely open, not subject to bizarre and restrictive caveats.