This past summer was a chance for most students to hang out with friends, work at boring summer jobs, and vaguely think of the coming semester. For The Spectrum, however, there was no time to daydream, especially when the newspaper's future existence was hanging in the balance.
Now, five months after the Student Association Senate passed a motion to pull $34,000 in subscription fees from UB's only undergraduate newspaper, The Spectrum can breathe easily again.
On Aug. 17, the Student-Wide Judiciary returned a decision stating that the SA's withdrawal of $34,400 in funds from the paper was "unfounded."
On April 30, three days after the end of classes, the SA Senate voted to pull the money from The Spectrum.
A subscription fee of $1 per undergraduate per semester is collected by SA and is usually passed on to The Spectrum.
Every four years, the mandatory student fee is put up as a referendum and the students must vote whether to make the $69.75 fee mandatory or voluntary, and also whether to pay $1 per semester to The Spectrum.
The SWJ reasoned that since it is the student body's decision to fund the paper, SA did not have the power to pull the money, according to the ruling issued August 12. While SA thought the money belonged to its organization, SA was actually only an intermediary in the funding process. Furthermore, minutes before SA pulled the funding it had already approved the funding as a part of its 2004-2005 budget.
At the meeting on April 30, Dan Smith, an SA Senator and chairman of the Senate Allocation Review Committee, made a motion to pull all funding from The Spectrum. The vote was a four to eight split, with the Senate ultimately deciding in favor of removing the funding. No Spectrum members were notified of the meeting.
"This was a meeting we didn't even know was happening. We weren't invited," said George Zornick, editor in chief of The Spectrum.
The previous semester, Dan Smith and the Senate Allocation Review Committee had asked The Spectrum for more information regarding its finances, organization and advertising methods. After The Spectrum answered that request, no other requests were made, and the editors there assumed that everything was fine with their funding. The meeting came as a shock to the editors at The Spectrum when they found out what had happened a few days later.
According to Lorenzo Guzman, previous SA Senator and current Senate Chair, none of the Senators except Cheryl Rozario, then Senate Chair, and Dan Smith knew that The Spectrum's funding would be discussed at the April meeting. The first Guzman knew of it was when the motion proposals were handed out to each senator at the beginning of the meeting.
Guzman said during the meeting Smith told the Senate that then Editor in Chief Erin Shultz had told him The Spectrum neither wanted nor needed the money, which was one of the main reasons the Senate voted to withdraw the funds.
"That was obviously an outright lie, because we definitely wanted the money," Zornick said.
A few months later, the case was brought before the SWJ in an attempt by The Spectrum to reinstate the funding. Guzman tried the case on behalf of the Senate.
Besides the allegation that The Spectrum did not want the money, Guzman said that the Senate was also concerned about a conflict of interest. The senators did not want The Spectrum to be influenced by the fact that a portion of its budget comes from SA, since the paper was supposed to be covering SA objectively.
Guzman said the Senate believed that since the money came through SA, it was SA's money. "I think that's where the biggest problem is. They don't understand that the dollar is not ours," Guzman said.
He also said that many senators wanted to keep that money for SA. "In their eyes, if we stop funding The Spectrum that dollar, SA has just acquired $34,000."
The SWJ ruling, which establishes SA as an intermediary in The Spectrum's funding, ensures the newspaper will receive the money as long as the student body votes it into the mandatory fee.
By early next week, a contract should be signed between SA and The Spectrum for release of the 2004-05 subscription fee.
"I'm just glad to get this issue settled," Zornick said. "I realize that the executive board (of SA) this year had nothing to do with this, so it hasn't hurt our working relationship."
Guzman agreed. "They got their money back and now they're happy. And I'm happy too," he said.
Jennifer Rose is a senior editor for Generation Magazine.
