Welcome to part four of this ongoing series investigating Finance Board (FB) and their compliance with the FinBoard Accountability, Communication, and Transparency (FACT) Amendment to the Student Government Association (SGA) Bylaws, a 2021 amendment to ensure transparency within FB policy, and specifically allocation money from the Student Activity Fund (SAF). In the first week, I dove into the history, context, and language. In the second week, I investigated the first half, which regulates membership policies. Last week. I looked at the second half, which are the major transparency requirements.
During the next part of this series – starting with today – I’m going to be focusing less on the policy itself, but rather on the general context that this all exists in. Today’s article will focus on the role of the Office of Student Life (OSL) in FB policy
When speaking about whether FB intends to comply with the FACT Amendment, FB Chair (FB-C) Nya Harrison has repeatedly stated that OSL has instructed that they do not need to. In a series of Discord messages in the “Illinois Tech” server on July 24, 2024, Harrison stated that people should talk to FB faculty advisor (FB-FA) and student life coordinator Sarah Hessasta or student life director Patrick Fina with questions. She said that she, vice-chair (FB-VC) Mohit Rathi, and Fina were working on a new FACT Amendment proposal. Additionally, she said organizations were allowed to request special hearings or talk to Hessasta if they had questions regarding their budget allocations. (When asked for clarification on budgeting, Hessasta directed questions back to FB.) In email conversations with me when I was requesting certain documents under disclosure policies, Harrison said the FACT Amendment “was ultimately deemed not helpful by OSL and previous chairs”. So, if FB is going to keep bringing OSL into the conversation about the FACT Amendment, let’s talk about their role.
First, I would like to acknowledge that OSL does indeed play a much larger role in the budgeting process than many students realize. When speaking with student leaders about this, there was a common misconception that OSL plays no role in the budgeting process. There are a lot of reasons for this, but from what I can find, this mainly has to do with former FB-C Chloe Rubinowicz, and a temporary lack of a FB-FA. Rubinowicz was an extremely independent chair, and without an advisor, it looked like FB operated independently of OSL. It’s possible that, under her leadership, it was actually functionally independent. But that’s not what is intended.
According to the SGA Constitution, a member of OSL “must be in attendance for any Finance Board hearing”, and that they “shall consider the final draft of any ledger and approve it in a manner so decided by the Office”. It also notes that OSL should only deny ledgers based on ongoing student appeals, school policies, or relevant legal statutes, and that they must provide reasoning for the denial. The Bylaws reaffirm this, while also noting that clubs are to work with OSL for storing capital purchases and for spending their funding. They note that any club who requests funds must be registered with OSL. Finally, “[t]he Board shall encourage a collaborative environment with the University’s Administration, Student Organizations, and Student Body [sic]”, which doesn’t explicitly mention OSL but at least has implications that include them as part of the university administration. That is the extent to which the Constitution and Bylaws even loosely reference OSL. Additionally, due to school policy, we know that all clubs must have a non-voting faculty advisor as part of their organization.
I will note parenthetically that the Constitution and Bylaws usually say “Office of Campus Life”, but given that they were renamed to OSL, I’m assuming these policies would update with the name change. If we stuck to the literal word, the only aspects that would still apply would be capital purchases and maybe the collaborative environment. I’m not saying that I think I could successfully make this case to any board of review, as they likely would go with the spirit of the policies. I’m just saying these documents are very out of date.
Going through each of the responsibilities of OSL within the budgeting process, whether OSL approves or denies a draft ledger has no bearing on if FB follows the FACT Amendment. Neither does the storage of capital items or if a club is registered with OSL. These policies shouldn’t change FB’s compliance.
It’s possible that following the FACT Amendment would make it easier to ensure proper distribution of funding, as it provides a clear record of why certain amounts were allocated. There have been cases where FB did not respond to a request for clarification on a budget restriction, so OSL wasn’t sure how to distribute funds appropriately. This would be a non-issue if FB’s reasoning was easily accessible. At a bare minimum, the FACT Amendment shouldn’t make it harder for OSL to do this. This policy might be a reason for OSL to encourage FB to be in compliance.
Next, let’s talk about the advisors and OSL members at hearings. Now, an advisor might encourage FB to consider changing transparency guidelines (or petitioning SGA to change these). That’s perfectly fine. But given faculty advisors are, by school policy, non-voting members of club executive boards, they shouldn’t be able to force FB to stop following the FACT Amendment. Similarly, I could see that an OSL member at a FB meeting might not want to be recorded. That said, because the Bylaws explicitly state that consent is not required to record, this shouldn’t be a reason to stop following the FACT Amendment. The provision about eavesdropping laws is designed for this exact situation.
Finally, there is the mandate to encourage a collaborative environment between stakeholders. I could potentially see a case to be made that, if a certain group wanted to ensure the FACT Amendment wasn’t followed, choosing to not follow it would be encouraging a collaborative environment. That said, I think this would need to be a balance of equities. This basically means that we need to weigh all concerns against each other to come to an equitable decision. I’ll delve into this more in a later issue, but every student not affiliated with FB who I have asked about the FACT Amendment either has been unfamiliar with it, has been neutral on its enforcement, or has been in favor of its enforcement. Most of these individuals were either current or former student leaders. I’m not perfect, and I acknowledge there may be individuals whom I have not spoken to who disrupt my statistics. But if administration, student organizations, and the student body are the noted stakeholders, and it seems two out of the three are broadly in favor of the FACT Amendment, then I would think that the balance of equities tips in favor of adhering to the policies.
Additionally, even if my calculation is fully off and the balance of equities does indeed tip in favor of not using the FACT Amendment, I’m not certain the collaborative mandate authorizes this. This is part of the Bylaws, as is the FACT Amendment. The Constitution does override policies in the Bylaws, so if the collaborative mandate was in the Constitution and the balance of equities was in favor of non-enforcement, then maybe the decision to not follow the FACT Amendment would follow policy. However, given this mandate has presumably equal procedural weight to the FACT Amendment, I’m not sure it can override policies found elsewhere within the Bylaws.
In response to requests for comment, Fina corroborated most points in this article (including their role in ledger approval and the purchasing and acquisition process), and said that OSL has agreed to serve as the initial point of contact for activities that require longer planning, such as conferences. He also said that SGA had recently updated their Bylaws and Constitution, and “OSL has advised SGA and Finance Board to follow the most current constitution and bylaws of SGA, as well as their published [F]inance [B]oard policies.” Finally, Fina wanted to add that OSL is currently working to implement a new student organization system, with an included budgeting system that will help increase accountability and transparency, and if anyone wanted to know more about this (or anything else related to organizations and OSL), they can contact him at pfina@iit.edu.
This assertion about updated policies is something that I have also heard from Harrison when making disclosure requests last semester. And I would like to make one thing clear up front: SGA is required to keep the public Constitution and Bylaws available on their website up-to-date with recent changes. There were updates to transparency policies in the Constitution in early 2024. That said, the FACT Amendment is still on the books according to the public copies of these documents, so the most current edition would include those. That’s not a matter of opinion or an issue up for debate; these are available for public viewing and anyone can check this for themselves. However, I do still plan to spend next week fully going into what the constitutional transparency requirements are, to make sure that I am doing justice to this conversation. It’s admittedly more nuanced than most areas of this, where I can just check whether or not it’s currently happening, and I want to handle it as such.
Finance Board did not respond to requests for comment.