This year’s Juice Jam ended on a bitter note: Headliner Fetty Wap didn’t just play a bad set, he didn’t show up at all. As dejected Syracuse University students left the music festival and University Union announced there would be no refunds, the next question was what would happen with the money.

Student Association decided last week that it would not provide UU with the funds that were meant for Fetty Wap. When UU requested that SA Comptroller Malik Evans grant them the money so it could go toward another project, SA refused and said its plan did not have students’ best interests in mind.

While the push to reallocate funds is understandable, SA’s decision to retain UU’s money is ultimately problematic. The two main issues are the undefined concept of what kinds of entertainment enrich student life and the partial defunding of UU at this point in the semester.

The best interests of students are pretty straightforward when it comes to questions of physical and mental well-being. But aspects of student life as subjective as preferred entertainment have too much grey area. SA needs to be more clear as to how giving UU its money back would not be a worthwhile extracurricular investment.

At the meeting, Evans said this decision was meant not to punish UU, but to better serve students. Yet it seems that UU is being penalized and even more unfairly, for a situation that it had no control over.

The rule for SU student organizations is that unused funds remain in an organization’s account throughout the semester, and return to the programming board at the end. The way in which SA has gone after UU’s money begs the question of whether the board takes such careful account of its dollars with every registered student organization on campus. But of course, the visibility and stakes of UU’s programming make the organization an easy target.

It is also unclear why these funds are being seized. It’s October. SA is supposed to get its money back at the end of the semester and SU is not even halfway through the semester. Apart from going against policy, SA’s decision also squashes any hope that UU had of putting on another or enhancing an already-scheduled event.

Sure, the smaller organizations could benefit from increased budgeting, so it may seem more egalitarian to redistribute money to more RSOs. But given that Juice Jam and similar events have an undeniably large, university-wide impact — due to UU being a well-established and popular SU group — SA should consider the consequences of altering these budgets.

If nothing else, this decision on behalf of SA should set a precedent for the student organizations whose acts and events fall through — even when, like UU, it’s through no fault of their own.

Published on October 3, 2016 at 12:33 am

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