The trouble in running a university is that somehow, it must all be paid for. There are certain other issues that tend to pop up now and again, but perhaps the most pervasive perennial issue is the budget. The main question of leading a university then becomes "how can we minimise losses of services and classes while decreasing the money we provide?" or "how can we maximise services and classes while increasing the money we provide?" Should you take any Business 100 class, this is roughly what the bottom line boils down to: how does one decrease money spent while maximising returns?
This article is not a critique of markets and the conversion of universities to a pseudo-privatised endeavour reliant upon creating money and not producing well-educated graduates or thoughtfully-written academic papers. The point of this article is to accept that UBC Okanagan has a budget that must be balanced, and that this year a casualty to that bottom line was the clubs of the SUO. It's no secret that in order to preserve its budget, the SUO is particularly stingy with distributing money to clubs for activities to ensure that only those clubs that need the funds can get them. Further restrictions have now been put into place, and I spoke with an executive for an engineering-focused club for their perspective. For the sake of anonymity, I will call them John Science.
As John explained it, the SUO was decreasing their funds to $4,000 per club. Naturally, the impact of this reduction varied widely between the various clubs, and for some, $4,000 is still quite a lot. The trick is that these funds are not permitted for "capital purchases," which means that you cannot buy club-relevant products with it. If you are in the aerial robotics and rocketry (UAV) club, for instance, you cannot use that money to purchase a computer for the robots. You can use it for things like travel, but as John explained, the last time his club needed to travel it cost approximately $15,000-$20,000 to move the equipment and people.
Another hitch in this system is that this money is only doled out if the clubs can prove to the SUO that they are working towards receiving outside sponsors. The intent of this system is to incentivize the clubs to get most of their funding from private interests, and SUO funds can then be used as a secondary source of funding. The trouble with this is that it is hard to privatise and monetise something like the Board Games Club, but if they want to buy any new board games, then the only way to do this without spending their own money out of pocket is to either receive outside funding from a private actor or book a meeting with the VP Finance for every purchase made with the $4,000.
It's an old and valuable piece of advice that the easiest way to hate something is to experience it for yourself. Presuming that this piece of advice holds true, a lot of students are about to hate the privatisation of their school clubs.
Take the UBCO Formula/Motorsports Club, where engineering students build a car. There are very few ways to make money from building a car from scratch, but if the club wants to earn enough money to make their car, they'll need to do just that. The implication here is that the team will need to cover as much of the car's paint with ads for Wonder Bread, Advil, or whatever people are willing to advertise if they want to "continue as normal" (albeit with a further reduced budget). Such measures will not be necessary for all clubs (such as those with lower budgets), but it is an eventuality being encouraged by the SUO to maintain a balanced budget.
While not related to the budget issue, John mentioned something I found quite interesting:
"All the engineering clubs, the big three – Motorsports, UAV, and IDS – by December we're losing our workshop. We're being moved to a lab ... we're being moved to a classroom. Motorsports, they don't know how they're [going to] move their stuff. Their car will be the size of half the classroom. How's that [going to] work?"
Every business needs to make money. The university needs to make money to keep operating. To continue operating, they have decided to cut the services described to you in this article. This is the consequence of operating a university like a business. Regardless of our worrying as to whether universities should need to be run like a business, this is the reality, and it will continue down this route so long as institutional change does not occur. As I said, this is something people will quickly learn to hate. Whether they act to change it remains to be seen.
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