Funding for clubs, activities often left unclaimed
By Matthew Meyerhofer
It's a little-known fact that each year, the Associated Students is given $42,000 of discretionary funding to dispense among the many student clubs on campus. That's $42,000 that students can use to help promote almost any sort of academic, cultural, service or social activity. The sad thing is that at the end of the year, it is highly unlikely that all this money will have been claimed.
Furthermore, most of the money that is used will not represent a wide variety of student interests. The majority of the big-ticket expenditures will go to either cultural clubs or club sports -- clubs that already receive support from other places on campus (the Multicultural Center and Athletics and Recreation, respectively). And after much debate, club sports will soon no longer be Associated Students' responsibility, leaving even less demand for these funds.
What's the point? It's that Santa Clara is, in many ways, a garden of opportunities where most of the fruit is left to rot on the vine. And AS's discretionary funding budget is only one example. Those of you who have been scanning the student events e-mails will have noticed that many of the chartered student organizations (such as The Santa Clara) are taking applications for positions next year, but the fact is that there is often only minimal response to these calls for leadership.
This raises a question in my mind. Are students genuinely not interested in joining existing organizations and founding new ones, or do many of them simply feel unsure or uneasy about it?
Granted, Santa Clara students have a tendency to fall in with one particular group and may feel like they are straying into "somebody else's" territory when they contemplate joining a new organization. But in my experience, at least, Santa Clara students generally are a friendly bunch, and thus the social barriers we imagine are usually just that: imaginary.
If in fact the reason for the unclaimed opportunities is lack of interest, then the problem paradoxically seems both smaller and yet all the more unfortunate. If students are happy to remain uninvolved or marginally involved with campus organizations, then there won't be the sense that anything is "missing" from their college experience. But at the same time, there is so much unclaimed potential.
It's a remarkable situation when you think about it. We are thrown into a community with more than 4,000 of our peers, given access to a variety of organizational and monetary resources, and pretty much told, "Do whatever you think will make your life more rewarding and more enjoyable."
The AS discretionary funding budget is just one of many pools of money students can draw on to subsidize their fun. And yet, more often than not, our reaction to this offer is, "Hmmmm. No thanks. I'm fine."
Maybe the situation only appears tragic since graduation is suddenly bearing down, and I have to face the fact that, as much as I have enjoyed my time at Santa Clara (and I really have loved it here), I feel like I could have done more.
So now I write in a fit of nostalgia and well-wishing for my fellow Broncos. You don't need to become one of those overextended types who belongs to six clubs, three honor societies, a sports team, a fraternity, and works 20 hours a week. In fact, I would highly recommend not doing this. I'm not advocating joining a club for the sake of "being involved" (although there are such benefits). I'm simply trying to pass along one recent insight.
It can be boiled down to this: College affords you the opportunity to convert vision into reality in a way that I think is unlike any other part of our life. There is the freedom to explore a variety of interests, and moving between them is a fluid experience, free of the friction that will later accompany any career moves. It's the harmless side of that ancient college rite of following your interests without regards to the consequences.
Matthew Meyerhofer is an English and philosophy major. He is also a senior senator for Associated Students.