The Tufts Community Union Treasury allocates approximately $2.7 million every year. This money, drawn from a $400 student activity fee, funds virtually every facet of student life at Tufts. The allocation of these funds remains a mystery to many students, even to those whose clubs depend on these funds.
The role of the treasury requires a bevy of normative judgments. What constitutes an acceptable use of funds is not necessarily obvious. Should club sports receive funding that would otherwise go to a new comedy troupe? Should culture clubs be prioritized over engineering teams? How much money should political groups receive, especially those on opposing sides of the aisle? These are not only complex questions, but decisions that can fundamentally alter student life.
Student organizations at other universities have raised concerns over the integrity of their Treasuries. University of Michigan’s student Treasury refused to fund all student groups until the school divested from Israel. Other universities have seen blatant corruption. Lack of proper oversight at Ohio University enabled one former student to embezzle over $180,000, prompting fraud charges. These examples demonstrate how a lack of proper oversight can jeopardize the integrity of student Treasury decisions.
At Tufts, funding decisions for student organizations fall to a handful of Treasury officers. These individuals are accountable solely to the Tufts Senate, which selects and removes them at its discretion. The Treasury is responsible for two main funding components: annual and supplemental. Annual funding occurs at the beginning of each year when clubs send their estimated yearly budgets. This information is publicly available on TCU’s website but is incomplete in its current form. Additionally, student organizations often seek supplementary funding for expenses unforeseen during the budgeting process. Unlike annual funding, information on supplementary funding is not publicly available. The TCU Treasury declined to share supplementary funding records with the Tribune.
According to the TCU Treasury manual, the Allocations Board (“ALBO”) delivers the final approval on annual and supplementary funding requests. ALBO consists of the TCU Treasurer, who serves as an impartial chairman, and nine senators, one of which must be the TCU President. The TCU President is ALBO’s only directly elected official. ALBO’s decisions need to be approved by the Senate majority with a major exception: If ALBO unanimously approves a bookmarked supplementary funding request under $2,000, the Senate does not need to vote on it. Bookmarks are funds set aside for a particular project, with the project defined in a student organization’s approved budget. The policy allows organizations to utilize funds with diminished Senate oversight. According to Emily Childs, a past Associate Treasurer, most funding requests ALBO examines are approved in this way, i.e. without a full Senate vote.
ALBO’s nine-person staff holds considerable power over student funding with limited safeguards to ensure propriety. Childs recalls she was nominated for ALBO “mostly as a joke” by former TCU President Jaden Pena after she arrived late to a Senate meeting. This raises questions about how seriously TCU takes the ALBO nomination process.
The actions of the current Treasury administration indicate that the prerogatives of the officeholders can affect funding patterns. Current Treasurer Dhruv Sampat campaigned partly to boost funding to cultural and religious clubs. These groups have since seen their funding rise by about 30% between the financial years 2023 and 2025. The increase has outpaced the 25% growth in total student budget. On the other hand, student media organizations as a whole saw a notable funding decline of 25% in the same period.
These funding changes have many possible explanations. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted student activities, creating a significant Treasury surplus. A former TCU Senator described how the COVID surplus has been a crucial part of club funding increases over the past three years. Since the surplus was mostly used to address supplementary funding requests, precise allocation from this surplus is difficult to discern, as these records are not publicly available. The former Senator also credits Sampat with implementing reforms that have increased transparency in this regard, such as integrating the money from the COVID surplus into the yearly budgets.
Despite increased transparency, ALBO oversight has decreased during Sampat’s tenure. Under Sampat, the Senate established a new threshold of $500 where supplementary funding requests can bypass an ALBO vote, placing the decision solely in the hands of the Treasurer. Childs, who served under Sampat as Associate Treasurer before graduating, felt that the reform enabled clubs to receive money quickly and easily at the cost of reducing Senate and ALBO oversight
More broadly, the Tufts community is divided over perceptions of the Treasury’s institutional efficacy. Some clubs have expressed frustration with the decision-making process that drives funding. Brooke Thompson of Tufts SEDS Rocketry said that her team’s rocket cost about $14,000 to build. Of that, TCU contributed around $2,000, a figure that Thompson feels was “not enough.” She also perceived a significant funding disparity between her team and Tufts Electric Racing, joking that “we’re building a rocket [while] their cars don’t even work!”
Another important variable for funding is whether the club has an affiliate or parent organization. Tufts’ Rocketry team is a chapter of SEDS, or Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. They are an international non-profit that provides grants, educational resources, and is part of a member network to its chapters. Tufts Electric Racing, while it has corporate sponsorships, does not have such a parent organization.
Senri Nakamura, head of Tufts Solar Vehicle Project, has had positive and negative experiences with the Treasury. Nakamura said it is “unclear …why sometimes the request [to the] allocation board will get rejected, or some other clubs get funded but not us.” While Nakamura felt that Sampat was generally reasonable with funding requests, he wondered if favoritism played a role in treasury decisions.
Whether due to favoritism or a simple budget crunch, perceptions of funding shortfalls have prompted clubs to diversify their income. Thompson and Nakamura detailed their efforts to fundraise outside of the Treasury through corporate sponsorships and grants. Brendan French, currently an Associate Treasurer, said that the Treasury encourages clubs to seek outside funding. Still, he acknowledged that finding outside funding is “probably really stressful” and emphasized his efforts to make Treasury procedures more accessible to clubs.
Still, the effects of these accessibility measures are mixed. A critic with intimate knowledge of the fundraising process for dozens of clubs, who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, said he has noticed more organizations with financial difficulties in recent years. According to him, these fiscal challenges have forced clubs to pursue external funding. The Treasury denied access to the funding records that could have corroborated or falsified this claim.
There are also structural issues within the Treasury that can negatively impact certain clubs. According to Nakamura, some clubs need access to funding over the summer in order to function effectively. For instance, the Tufts Solar Vehicle Project has a major competition in July but cannot spend Treasury funds after May. Nakamura argues that such policies make it challenging to allocate funds for the competition, “which creates difficulties.”
Nakamura’s comments comport with a sentiment expressed across many interviews in this investigation: The mechanics of a $2.7 million operation are overseen by less than a dozen students who are internally elected (with the exception of the TCU President). Recent measures have decreased broader Senate oversight for small-dollar funding requests. The organizations most affected by the Treasury’s individual funding decisions have, at best, limited access to the decision-making process that can determine the survival of their groups. Since the Treasurer is not elected by the student body and is subject only to the standards of the TCU itself, there exist few mechanisms to ensure propriety within the Treasury. While there are few indications of abuse within the current Treasury leadership, students and student groups lack to recourse to address any future problems.
Disclaimer: João Ribeiro, Copy Editor of the Tribune, was a TCU Senator and Allocations Board member during part of the period discussed in this story. Ribeiro was not involved in this article.
Photo by Steve McFarland (October 19th, 2006)