TO THE EDITOR:
I was disappointed with Rep. Steele’s letter about Tuesday’s Student Congress funding allocations. I felt it considerably misrepresented the body’s discussion surrounding the proposed Ann Coulter speaking engagement.
A request asking for more than $20,000 for an event that is already scheduled for only two weeks away is a huge one, and that much money for one event is typically not within our funding guidelines.
Had we granted the entire request, the cost per attendee would have been over $37 in student fees, with no guarantee all attendees would be students.
The decision to move the allocation to the fundraising category, requiring them to pay some of the funding back by the end of the year, was a compromise that allowed them to continue the event as planned while not dipping into funds that could be more evenly spread to the hundreds of other groups in need.
Steele’s assertion that only members of Young Democrats presented an opposing viewpoint is inaccurate, as many other representatives who are not members of that group, including myself, had reservations about the size of the request that were unrelated to the speaker’s political views.
Leah Josephson
Student Congress, District 6
