STAFF EDIT: A buzzworthy mistake

A Daily Free Press investigation of funding policies for Boston University student publications yielded the necessity for the Allocations Board to rescind university funding originally given to the up-and-coming lifestyle magazine the BU Buzz. The magazine’s editors made the decision to be dependent on university funding for financially practical reasons, but after reviewing the Lifebook, saw that all opinion-based publications are by policy unable to receive funding. Upon proposing the Buzz to the AB anyway, however, they were surprised to be granted funding after all. When the transaction seemed disparate with Lifebook guidelines, Daily Free Press reporters brought the matter to Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore, the final word on financial allocations to Student Activity Office-approved groups. Elmore halted funding to the Buzz, on the grounds that the AB had made an error.

The Buzz now faces the unfortunate process of revising their entire business model to make up for the funding they lost. As hard as it is already for a group of students to organize, write, edit, print and market a publication on campus, the SAO and the AB just made it that much more difficult, because they did not properly interpret the policy set forth by the Lifebook. These administrative bodies are supposed to be supportive and helpful of student groups, but instead, they have caused setbacks. The Buzz incident was only revealed due to research, and it’s possible that this isn’t the first time that student money was used incorrectly or student groups were wronged by the SAO and AB. And since a story published about the Buzz on BU Today now features false information, the Buzz suffers more because of the errors of others.

Students don’t choose whether or not they want to pay the fee of over $250 to the AB to help fund student-run organizations under the SAO. Instead, all BU students contribute mandatorily, the idea being that their money will come back to them in the form of student endeavors that will further enrich their experiences on campus. But if the money is being used incorrectly and against policy, and these discrepancies are not even caught by the overseer of the operation, Dean Elmore, the system will lose credibility. And no one will want to put their money into the hands of people who lack credibility, and no student group will want to face the risk of losing funding that was originally promised to them, the way the Buzz did. If students have the responsibility to color their own campus lifestyles with their own endeavors, the administrative bodies that control this system need to be functioning on a consistent, ethical and trustworthy foundation.