Turn down for what? More funding for clubs, committees, student awards, and mental health services, thousands of McMaster University students urged elected officials this past week.
A proposal to spend more than $200,000 on an end-of-year party was withdrawn after overwhelming opposition from the student body.
Alternative motions for a celebration valued at either $170,000 or $95,000, respectively, were rejected by the McMaster Students’ Union (MSU) at its student representative assembly Oct. 19.
MSU president Teddy Saull withdrew his motion to hold the $215,000 year-end celebration, saying the proposal had incited significant outrage from the student body.
“There’s no doubt that there has been enough noise made about this [and] that people aren’t comfortable going ahead,” he told a packed assembly room.
In a memo on the MSU website, Saull announced the motion earlier in the week, which he planned to table at the meeting.
The motion cited the organization’s considerable budget profit—projected at over $130,000 for 2015 after profit margins of approximately $286,000 in 2014 and $370,000 in 2013 as reasons to spend money on something students would enjoy.
The party, “designed to bring students together for a final hurrah,” would be bigger than homecoming, according to Saull’s motion.
Before the meeting, a vocal student body spoke out against the proposal.
Jonathon Patterson, a second-year geography and environmental studies student at McMaster, started a petition opposing Saull’s idea that gained over 1,500 signatures in about a week.
Patterson said the motion didn’t incorporate any discussion process with students regarding their thoughts on MSU’s spending.
“Student engagement is something that is supposed to be a ‘game changer’ to the student experience, and where I feel this is extremely flawed is that there’s no intention to consult the wider student body,” Patterson said.
“When you’re talking about something that’s in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and it’s for an expense that isn’t a long-term investment—something that you’re spending a significant amount of money on one single event—that should be a discussion that’s had and it wasn’t,” he said.
Saull said at the meeting that his motion was originally meant to start a conversation about ways the MSU could further engage students, and that he wasn’t “married” to any of the budgeting options.
He added the MSU’s finance committee unanimously supported the idea.
Patterson said McMaster students have put forth other ideas that would benefit more students.
These options include increasing funds for McMaster’s Women and Gender Equity Network, improving access to mental health services, giving more money to clubs, creating more student awards, and looking into investing on capital upgrades at the school.
“When you look at it as a total allocation as opposed to per student, it’s definitely a huge amount of money and I’m not supportive of that as an expense,” Patterson said of the initial motion.
“I could probably come up with a dozen ways to spend $100,000 or $200,000 [and] I would definitely put those things forward, but that’s not the discussion we’re having right now.”
