Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) Inc. passed a motion Nov. 12 to start a bursary fund that will give $1,000 to 10 undergraduates per year.
The bursary starts January 2014, CUSA vice-president (finance) Folarin Odunayo said.
Carleton’s five faculties will each have two bursaries, according to the motion.
To finance the bursaries, CUSA is putting $212,000 into the university’s endowment fund.
In January 2014, CUSA will use $10,000 of that to fund the first round of bursaries, according to Odunayo.
In April 2014 CUSA will use $2,000 plus the interest generated on the remaining $200,000—which will be $8,000 at the endowment fund’s four per cent interest rate—to finance the next round of bursaries.
Following that, bursaries will be generated perpetually at just the amount of interest accrued on the $200,000, which may vary, Odunayo said.
The university’s awards office will decide who will get the money.
University control will take any politics out of awarding, CUSA president Alexander Golovko said.
Twelve-thousand dollars of the $212,000 comes from cuts in executive salaries, Golovko said.
The motion was passed almost unanimously except for an abstention by the Graduate Students’ Association (GSA).
Lauren Montgomery, the GSA’s representative at the meeting, asked Golovko why he was in favour of creating a bursary fund when he voted in favour of tuition increases during the July 2013 Board of Governors’ meeting.
Golovko said at the meeting he did not vote in favour of tuition increases.
He said in July 2013 that he voted in favour of the university’s 2013-14 budget as a whole so the university could operate, and “tuition fee increases are undesirable and difficult for any student to swallow.”
The bursary fund was one of the platform points of the “A Better Carleton” slate, which swept the 2012-13 elections and now holds the five CUSA executive positions.
