Prospective students on campus tours often hear references to the “Big Four” in relation to student activities at Hopkins. This is not a reference to the top consulting firms that entrepreneurship and management minors seek employment at; It refers to four large student-led organizations that plan events and programs for the Hopkins community: the Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium (MSE), the Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS), Spring Fair and the Hopkins Organization of Programming (HOP). These organizations contribute toward building community and traditions on the Homewood campus.
Faced with the reputation that school spirit at Hopkins is lacking, the resources provided to these organizations are part of a mandate to promote creative and innovative ways to improve the Hopkins experience.
Earlier in the month, The News-Letter covered Hoptoberfest events that took place during the first week of October (see “Hopkins welcomes autumn with Hoptoberfest,” Oct. 13). Many might be unaware that the Hoptoberfest committee is independent from the HOP — the frequent use of the word “Hop” could be confusing. Some have also mentioned in passing that Hoptoberfest was initially created by members of the HOP and that both organizations have significant personnel crossover.
Regardless of whether that is true, this reflects a concerning uncertainty and ambiguity about what our main student programming organizations do. Arguably this is a problem that the HOP and Hoptoberfest face more often than Spring Fair, MSE or FAS. While the latter three organizations have a clear series of events to put on, the former two are more flexible with how they use funds, whether it is through regular programs such as First Sunday Sundaes or through co-sponsorships with other organizations.
What exactly is wrong with uncertainty and ambiguity in student programming? This question can be answered by examining how we value transparency and accountability. Some student organizations have lamented how their budget and available resources have been cut. Some other student organizations may not even be fully aware of their own budgets. Attempts to ask members of the Big Four (and Hoptoberfest, most recently) about their budgets often elicits a secretive non-response as if one is asking for nuclear codes or state secrets.
One member once shared that the rationale behind not releasing budgetary information was “to prevent people who didn’t like [the event] from seeing it the wrong way.” This makes no sense. In the absence of clear expectations as to what these organizations must do in order to build community (say, plan a series of weekly symposium events), the flip-side of a top-down framework for action is a clear and robust plan to measure bottom-up accountability to prevent cronyism and corruption.
Objectively, there is really no good reason that the budgets of these organizations should not be public information. Considering that these organizations are using University resources (be it from the Dean of Student Life’s office or the Parent’s Fund, etc.) to fulfil their mandate of improving the student experience, it intuitively follows that students (who themselves and through their parents have contributed these resources) should have access to information about how these resources are being used.
This isn’t even an argument about whether all students should have the right to influence how these resources are being used. That would relate to the recruitment procedures for these organizations, a separate subject altogether. Instead, this relates to whether students have the right to access information about what these resources are. If we desire our Hopkins community to be informed and engaged citizens in this election season, surely our own institutions should reflect the transparency and accountability that we consider crucial to our values.
Why does no one seem to care about the absence of checks and balances when it comes to these student organizations? Navigating the complex bureaucracy of student organizations is often not something on the typical student’s radar. What these organizations do, or fail to do, has little impact on the current state of the student experience. When building from a low base, organizations can afford to be loose with their expectations.
After all, if attendance at an event is poor, organizers can attribute the turnout to “poor school spirit” or “disengaged students” instead of applying a rigorous assessment of whether an event had the potential to be better or whether resources could have been better spent in another way. In some sense, organizers (likely unintentionally) leverage information asymmetries to reinforce mediocre student programming instead of establishing a vision of excellence. Students don’t know better.
Nevertheless, one cannot be too harsh on the organizers either. They are also students who have only known the Hopkins experience. The HOP has apparently flown its officers to regional student programming conferences in the past. The idea behind this is decent, but the seeming absence of tangible improvement or follow-up suggests that this is nothing but another misuse and misallocation of resources.
This relates to one particularly irksome thing, an irritation others may or may not share: the long lines every single time one of the large student organizations gives out a free shirt. Apart from inefficiency, one has to wonder whether the organizing team generously helps themselves to a set of their own giveaways. This is not to say that those who invest in putting on an event should not reap the rewards of doing so. But it would certainly be easier to accept rather than lament the good work of these student-led teams if we had a more transparent and accountable system.
One has to wonder if there are sufficient resources to give everyone on this campus a free shirt. Based on back-of-the-envelope calculations from ballpark figures at the 1876 Leadership Weekend, this seems realistic. However, until information is easily accessible, the student standing in line for a free shirt would never know what is possible.
Change may be hard to come by. Ultimately, one may even argue that long lines have themselves become tradition. But standing in line for a free giveaway while simultaneously holding a book to study for tomorrow’s calculus midterm is a rather unfortunate tradition. This is not a proper representation of the amount of resources that our Hopkins community already invests in the student experience. We can do better.
Tommy Koh is a junior in the departments of political science, psychology and social policy.
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