As the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate moves to establish a student activities endowment in accordance with its recent vote on the disbursement of $687,780 in recovered funds, senators are investigating the various options open to them.
At its Dec. 7 meeting, the Senate translated months of soliciting student input into a decision to reserve $300,000 in savings, use $300,000 to create an endowment that would supplement student activities and allocate the remaining $87,780 to student groups. The money, which was allegedly embezzled by two former administrators, became available to the Senate after the body was reimbursed by the administration.
The $87,780 will become immediately available to students as soon as the Allocations Board begins to meet this semester. Student groups interested in obtaining some of the funding will have to go through the customary procedure of petitioning the Allocations Board for funding.
The influx of additional cash means that student groups can pursue projects for which there does not usually exist adequate funding, according to TCU Treasurer Matt Shapanka.
"There's no particular thing the money is set aside for, but the spirit of the $87,000 is for things that groups wouldn't get in the normal budgeting cycle," Shapanka, a senior, said. "Student groups will apply for things they normally wouldn't get."
Shapanka has held a few preliminary meetings with administrators about the proposed endowment and said the Senate will be circumspect while setting up the fund. "The general consensus was to minimize the risk and not lose money," Shapanka said.
Senator Sam Wallis said that although the Senate will create the endowment with the aim of generating revenue for student activities, making money must be secondary to ensuring the principal remains immune to financial turbulence.
"During the Senate meetings I always argued that we should not be risking the money students paid expecting to see service coming out of that," Wallis, a sophomore, said. "I was always pushing [for] making sure it's the safest investment, even if we're getting a low return."
In an e-mail to the Daily, Treasurer and Vice President for Finance Thomas McGurty said that he and Shapanka discussed the objectives of the Senate "in creating an endowed fund and the implications of various alternative investment strategies."
Shapanka declined to comment on the array of forms the endowment might take or where its contents could be invested, saying that such speculation would be premature because "nothing formal has happened yet" in his meetings with the administration.
Still, the TCU treasurer noted that some options, such as placing the $300,000 in the larger "total return pool" of the university endowment, are less desirable because they limit the Senate's control over
the money.
Although Shapanka was uncertain of how much power the administration would have to override the Senate's preferences in setting up the endowment, he said this issue remains of paramount concern to the Senate.
"Senators are uncomfortable with putting [the endowment] into something the administration controls" and for which transparency is not guaranteed, Shapanka said. "Technically we can invest in anything we want, but we have to do it through the administration … so we want to make sure that we have a lot of say over it."
The responsibility for establishing the endowment falls largely on the TCU Treasury, said Shapanka, who labeled the process "a business decision."
"When the Senate approved the breakdown … they allocated that money and they basically gave it to the Treasury to figure out what to do with it," Shapanka said. "They said to create an endowment, so I consider that my charge."
Although Shapanka will continue to seek fellow senators' input and "is not going to move forward unilaterally," he added that it would be impractical to seek extensive student input as the Senate did prior to last month's vote.
"It's not a question of what to do with the money; it's a question of how to invest it and that's up to the Treasury," he said.
Shapanka could not definitively comment on whether another Senate vote is required to create the endowment, saying that senators have offered conflicting opinions on the matter.
While some students have questioned the effectiveness of being so cautious with the recovered funds, Shapanka believes that they have been sympathetic for the most part to the spirit of the Senate's decision.
"At the end of the day," Shapanka said, "I think people are respecting the fact that we tried to be responsible with it and tried to make the impact as big as possible in a way that would reflect what the money was for."
