Should non-participants be forced to subsidise events?

Oh how trendy it is to decry the College for their financial decisions! Mind you, short of stating parallels with ‘Butcher of the Somme’, we can settle for glorifying an ambiguous term such as ‘student experience’ – nails in the coffin, I tell you! But do we try to view this topic from a rational perspective? I’m afraid the morality fever has permeated the campus a little too far for that – let’s hope I’m mistaken.

A few clarifications I require with regards to the article. What’s the point of saying 220k budget is 0.22% of the College’s endowment fund? Do you think that it should be 0.23% or maybe 0.26%? Your argument only decries a loss of money from the fund for social events of halls, on the basis that otherwise, it would go to achieve some ‘common good’, aka student experience – and promptly say that that 220k is ‘fully affordable’ for the College. You put forward arguments for the existence of the fund, not its degree of financial resources; justifying affordability of the fund based on a statistic of 0.22% looking meagre, getting the gullible to agree with your alarmist approach. Not to mention that endowment actually concerns partly the investment of the principal the College cannot use to fund on-going expenditures, only the interest return it brings. So one actually needs to fiddle with the definition of endowment to arrive at 0.22%.

Your view of budgets, that if an activity in isolation is deemed as affordable because it represents some small part of the budget hence justified, is somewhat of a ridiculous premise. We need to consider 1) whether given activity is in the remit of the College, 2) the costs and benefits of activity 3) compare the activity to the host of other possibilities. That’s a complex task, but tackling step 1 will be sufficient to absolve us of any need to proceed to steps 2 and 3.

Do social events by halls have 100% attendance rate? No. Whatever it is, it implies that non-participants are subsidising the participants – the money ultimately comes from students paying for halls. What right do people attending the events, including the hall seniors, have to justify forcing non-participants to subsidise these events? Student experience? First, money’s taken off me, then I find out it goes to pay for some piss-up, and finally I’m told I can attend whether I like it or not – some experience, eh? (Before you say I don’t have to live in halls: isn’t that a bit rich when we have a system of public universities, receiving proceeds from general taxation? College is not a private entity.)

This is the pretence of knowledge – alleging that hall seniors know better how to provide student experience, rather than each individual student deciding what events to pay for and engage to boost their ‘student experience’. Value is subjective, each individual is valuing trade-offs differently and by denying me choice of spending my own money (that I had to chip in for the fund in the first place) on other events that will improve my ‘student experience’, I am denied the ‘student experience surplus’. Let’s say that I decide to go to a student event to socialise, and hence boost my ‘student experience’, for which I pay £x; I will pay for it if I personally value the ‘student experience’ I get to be above £x; that difference is the surplus that oh, makes me happy! A one-size fits all approach of redistribution cannot achieve this.

Alas, the answer is nearly provided in your article. You say, that with the loss to the fund, there will be fewer events by halls. If the events are in demand by residents of halls, seniors can put them up, charge for them, and see how it goes. Let them compete with what this ‘unfriendly city’ has to offer.

Now, I assume you could say, because I benefit from social cooperation of students, I am obliged to give back to boost their student experience. Sorry, but social cooperation is a result of human action, not a perquisite – no subset of the student body provides it for my enjoyment which would justify charging me for utilising it and neither do I. It is a spontaneous result with no ownership; one can withdraw to their own detriment. But what about students who benefit less from that social cooperation? It’s their choice how much they act to benefit from it – we have an equal right to social cooperation, but no right to equal outcomes from it.

Now what do I think of the College’s action? We pay them fees and in return we expect education in an environment conducive to it. They should strive to provide, this but that doesn’t justify engaging in redistribution of ‘student experience’. Scrap the fund and lower the fees for halls. Don’t give into wailing about student experience – otherwise, you support their conclusions that you know better how to provide ‘student experience’ then students themselves. And I am holding the College to this standard because at the end of the day, they are a public university – don’t let me keep this small argument that would favour the idea of privatising Imperial.