The Room Where It Happens

The little-known grudge matches shaping how university funding gets spent.

By Schuyler Daffey

Illustration by Em Bennett

On November 22, 2024, Columbia’s undergraduate governing bodies met in a large Uris lecture hall to discuss the reallocation of $338,700 of funding. The event, dubbed F@CU II, was unprecedented. The money had been freed up after Melanie Bernitz, the Interim Executive Vice President of University Life, gave the student governing boards credit to compensate councils for facilities and securities funds. After the class councils reclaimed their share, the boards vied for the remaining $223,100. This was a heated battle, spurred on by the need to meet a high demand with a limited supply, which created tensions and fractures between the leaders of the respective governing boards. ABC’s outsized demands initiated particularly tense discussions in the meeting. After the time ran out on their fraught hour of battling with each other for funding, the student leaders gathered together to pose for a photo at the front of the room. 

The irony in this abrupt reversal was not lost on anyone. 

F@CU (shorthand among insiders for Financials at Columbia) typically occurs every year in the fall before school starts for the semester. From the total sum of Undergraduate Student Life fees, the Student Council Executive Board decides on the sum they require for the next year, and then put the rest of the money back into the metaphorical pot, after which the residual sum is awarded to ABC (Activities Board at Columbia), SGB (Student Governing Board), Community Impact, Bacchanal, the InterGreek Council, and CSGB (Club Sports Governing Board). Every board is allowed to make a request, but only class councils have a vote in the final sums of money allotted. Funding cuts, then, are effectively entirely out of the student governing boards’ control. What’s more, F@CU is not a public process: It is not advertised to student groups and the average student at Columbia may never have heard of the annual meeting. It seems wrong that despite such enormous amounts of money being allocated—money that determines the fate of student groups, and thus has so much bearing on the student experience at Columbia—F@CU remains cloistered and covert.

Armando Gimenez, CC ’26, current President of ABC, joined the organization through happy coincidence. He remarks, chuckling wryly, that “I got bamboozled into joining ABC,” explaining that a girl he had a crush on convinced him to come to a meeting, where he unwittingly signed a piece of paper which made him indigenous representative. Despite being a founding member of Columbia Culinary Society in his Freshman year, Gimenez ultimately left to focus on ABC, because “it was the place I felt I could make the most effective change.” Driven by a desire to respond to discontent he perceived from Columbia students, who faced recurring problems with securing sufficient club funding and spaces in which to meet, Gimenez rapidly rose through the ranks of ABC, becoming treasurer his junior year and eventually president.

While ABC typically funds performance-based clubs which put on larger programming— from Orchesis to Kwanzaa, SGB services clubs associated with activism and religious work, which generally put on smaller events. Mohammad Hemeida, CC ’25, former chair of ABC, has been on the board since the spring of his freshman year. He describes how the increase in the student life fee did not meet the anticipated facility and service expenses calculated by governing boards this year—encompassing everything from background check costs to AV and Tech fees—which had increased from the previous year. Indeed, a significant reduction in the funds awarded to governing boards this year—from $1,352,031.06 in 2023 to $1,206,830.14 in 2024—wreaked havoc on the expected finances of the governing boards. When it seemed that the Facilities and Services fund was in danger of going into overdraft, several governing board and class presidents, including Hemeida, organized a meeting with former President Katrina Armstrong, which resulted in Melanie Bernitz approving the Facilities and Securities fund credit to compensate councils.

Hemeida initially joined the board as a way in which to advocate for student groups and ensure events, co-sponsorships, and allocations were run more smoothly. The process of funding allocation, as Hemeida puts it, is that of “a large amount of power concentrated in a small number of people which decides the fate of a ton of student groups.” Hemeida ran for chair of SGB in the spring of 2024, amid the construction of the encampment and pro-Palestinian protests on campus. He describes that time period as occurring alongside some significant changes in the senior administration, in addition to several updates to university rules and guidelines being released which appeared to alter the way in which student groups functioned. 

“If we were undertaking this project of reforming the way student groups worked, of creating new disciplinary rules and guidelines about the way student groups were run, especially with political and religious groups which were heavily mired in the controversy on campus,” said Hemeida. “I felt that I could contribute something real to the discussion.” Hemeida ensured that student groups received the clarification on university rules and protections they needed from the administration: “We succeeded in finding the things student groups agreed on, no matter what side you were on and ensuring the university never transgressed on those important values.” 

Among these accomplishments was an explicit clarification from University Administration that student groups could hold events without fear of their board members being held liable for a possible breach of university policy or conduct. He has since fought for confirmation that if an individual were to attend an event in which there is a confirmed rules violation, the group itself will be disciplined rather than any arbitrary attendee of the event. Hemeida was also concerned that this fear of retribution for attending events on campus would have a chilling effect on campus speech: If the nebulous nature of University rules persisted, students would continue to fear for their safety and culpability, which would in turn mitigate discourse, dialogue, and activism on campus. 

Despite fighting for their constituents’ rights to free discourse and unimpeded participation in events on campus, the role of chair or president of a student governing board is one that can often be Sisyphean, and sometimes even thankless. These positions entail enormous pressure from student groups who blame their respective governing boards for insufficient funding due to cuts which ultimately are out of the governing boards’ control, since governing boards do not get a vote in the allocation of funding. Boards merely draft a report for councils to use in their decisions. Meanwhile, F@CU is necessarily fraught. Without a mandate on how money is dispersed, one group is often forced to step down to ensure the others meet their requirements. In September 2024, for instance, Community Impact requested only $8000 dollars, far less than their initial amount, in order to free up funds for the other boards. And in F@CU II, Community Impact received none of the reallocation money. 

Budgeting deficits plague Greta VanZetten, CC ’26, President of CSGB (Club Sports Governing Board). As the most chronically underfunded board, CSGB is only capable of meeting 40% of each sport’s needs, forcing clubs to subsidise through participant fees in order to stay afloat. VanZetten explains that CSGB cannot afford to mismanage funds; every expense must be rigorously tracked and accounted for. While Club Sports use every cent of their funding each year, ABC and SGB regularly have a surplus. Indeed, clubs within ABC and SGB were reminded in a recent email to spend all of their funding before the end of the semester, a bitter pill to swallow for VanZetten, when Club Sports must generate altogether over one million in revenue per year to be able to meet their running costs. 

As a direct consequence of funding not meeting expected costs for club teams, most, if not all, sports charge a membership fee, while higher level competitions, like regionals and nationals, are often paid out of pocket. These participation fees range from reasonable to astronomical, with membership of the ski and snowboarding Team, at the highest end of the spectrum, costing up to $925 per semester. Participation in Club Sports, then, can be costly at best and inaccessible at worst, especially since CSGB can afford to set aside only $2000 out of $19,000 funds for first generation and low income students. 

VanZetten’s devotion to her role is evident: she advocates ardently for the value of Club Sports to the student population and is able to reel off a series of statistics on student participation (over 2000 students from all four undergraduate schools, participating in over 36 different clubs, with more waiting to be recognized). And she has to be a strong proponent of the board, as “Club Sports operates in a weird position, because we intersect both athletics and University Student Life, and I think often we are left out of the USL picture and defaulted to athletics, but not fully part of athletics either.” CSGB is often excluded from other governing board privileges. This is the first year that Club Sports was eligible to apply for JCFC (Joint Council Financial Committee) funding, a hard won fight at F@CU, while CSGB was the only board not invited to be part of Days on Campus for incoming students. 

F@CU, and the club recognition process more broadly, is evidently far from ideal. It is no surprise that Gimenez, VanZetten, and Hemeida all expressed their frustrations at not being franchised, and thus not being given a voice in the decision making process at F@CU. But the process of allocating funding used to be far more egalitarian, with every Governing Board, alongside the councils, a voting member, before the F@CU constitution was changed in 2023 to allow only councils to vote on the final allocation of funds. The former constitution has been erased from the internet, despite Gimenez’s efforts to find it. 

The draconian decision to alter the constitution came after a particularly heated Spring F@CU, when the InterGreek Council was awarded no funding. Hemeida recalls the other Governing Board leaders conspiring to vote down the IGC share, joining forces to weaken IGC’s vote in order to secure more funding for their clubs. The councils determined that altering the constitution would prevent governing boards from having overtly hostile working relationships, since, to secure their own funding, governing boards would routinely target another board’s allocation. Councils argue that as the group entrusted with the student life fee, they should have ultimate control over its allocation, while governing boards contend that they have been stripped of their voice and should have a more concrete role in funding as stewards of the groups who shape so much of the student experience at Columbia. 

Yet rather than simplifying the allocation process, the newfound powerlessness of the governing boards has instead resulted in the nuances and intricacies of F@CU politics beginning to resemble, to some extent, the convoluted side deals and clandestine rendezvous of Julius Caesar. Gimenez explains that, without a voice in the final fund allocation process, ABC has “to speak to each council individually to get them to vote in our favor.” If a governing board wants to propose a constitutional change during F@CU, that board must meet individually with each council to campaign for support on their cause. It seems fitting, somehow, that Columbia’s club funding process would resemble lobbying on the Hill more than anything else. Lobbying, that is, over your Undergraduate Student life fees.