Undergraduate Finance Board

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The Undergraduate Finance Board (UFB) was created in 1984 to control all student fees at Brown University. UFB's operating budget comes from the student activities fee, paid annually by Brown students and their parents, and also from unspent money returned to the board by Brown student groups.

1 Role in Student Government
2 Membership
3 Criticism
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Role in Student Government

UFB is often overshadowed by the Undergraduate Council of Students (UCS), the formal student government, because it is generally less prominent and vocal on campus for most of the year, with the exception of the announcement of student group budget allocations, which coincides with the student government's election season. Additionally even many Brown students do not understand exactly what the Undergraduate Finance Board is. Nevertheless, the UFB is arguably more powerful than UCS because it determines the budget of practically every student group at Brown University, including that of the Undergraduate Council of Students itself. In fact, UFB cut UCS's budget by about 70% in April of 2006, citing the council's wasteful spending. [1] Since UFB can directly control how well-funded each student group is, it can also determine what student groups are financially able to do, which in turn can affect things as fundamental as student groups' policies and roles on campus.

[edit] Membership

The board is composed of 12 members, 9 of which are popularly elected annually. The Chairperson and Vice-Chairperson are usually experienced members who are already familiar with the school's administration and the allocation of student fees. The Chairperson is responsible for negotiating with school administrators and with UCS. He or she is also the public face of UFB. The Vice-Chairperson has no official responsibilities but is a powerbroker within the organization. The Secretary is elected from within the ranks of the UFB representatives and is considered the third in command. The representatives are each given a select number of student groups to lobby for. These representatives decide how to allocate the student body's annual fiscal resources of roughly one million dollars.

[edit] Criticism

Deeply criticized for secret meetings and a lack of record-keeping and transparency, the Board moved in 2004 to open part of its meetings and be held more accountable by the students. It has also vowed to institutionalize a better system of record keeping, since its records of budget allocations for most student groups date back no earlier than 1998. Thus far it has not responded to criticism that it tends to favor new, up-and-coming student groups over old established ones by taking money out of the budgets of the old groups to pay for the new ones. Several groups such as the Brown Democrats, the Brown Debating Union, and the Critical Review have claimed significant financial woes as a result of this alleged pattern.

For years students have also criticized some members of the Undergraduate Finance Board for pushing for disproportionate funding for their own personal "pet project" groups. Critics claim that it is impossible for UFB members to be held accountable for the decisions they make, because the board announces its final decisions about budget allocations after elections for the next year's representatives have already concluded, and thus it is rare that a member of the Board is in a position to be re-elected after his or her priorities for financing student groups have been made evident. Moreover, individual UFB members' voting records are not published.