Raise the food cap for culture groups

There are over 30 groups in the Council I “Cultural” category in the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate, ranging from the Chinese Students Association to the Thai Club to the Queer Straight Alliance. As detailed in a March 11 Daily article, these groups face complex budgetary issues that result in friction between those wanting funding and a Senate that has strict rules about allocation. 

The Senate caps food as a percentage of culture groups’ budgets at 40 percent, while other groups — political, pre-professional and others — have food caps at 20 percent. The food caps cause particular difficulty for culture groups because food is a major vehicle for sharing one's culture. Thus, these groups are sometimes forced to spend more money planning events to meet the 40-60 stipulation in the Senate's Treasury Procedures Manual (TPM). TCU Treasury officials responded to complaints by explaining that without the food cap, Senate would have to establish a cap on each club’s overall budget, an act that could be seen as favoring some groups over others, a thorny issue to say the least.

The food caps imposed on culture groups are a significant everyday example of these shortfalls between where we are and where we want to be. Senate has made huge strides this semester, including leading the charge on instituting Indigenous People's Day after faculty had voted it down just last semester. Still, it should strongly consider rewriting the TPM and opening up the treasury process to include more input from students. Culture groups don't have the money to put together the wonderful events they have planned, but Treasury members could certainly host a funding panel in a more public location and during a more opportune time than its cloistered Sunday night gatherings, in order to better understand how to best allocate its supposedly stretched budget.

That solution may be distant, but in the interim, we as students should strongly consider being patrons of student organizations that host events. Support for our multicultural community may even be more in line with our values as students than providing funding vertically and only after an onerously bureaucratic process.

Tufts boasts of its diversity, but we as a community have too often fallen short of our goals. As Tufts brings students and faculty from almost every corner of the world together in an effort to fit numerous cultures onto campus, obviously there will be friction between what we can be and what we want to be. At the same time, we must regard our mix of cultures as the bedrock of the "international" image that we cultivate and the community we want to be — more than a brochure.