24 CommentsThe Spectator reported on a proposal sent to the Undergraduate Student Councils this morning. ESC has just released an official response approving the proposal and funding a subsidy to help with the costs of opening the lawns and hiring safety personnel. The full text of the ESC proposal is included below. Post will be updated with additional Student Council Responses if and when they are released.
Regarding the Engineering Student Council Vote on the March 26th Bacchanal Proposal
Over the past several months, the Bacchanal Committee has worked to put together the spring concert on April 4th. As students on campus are well aware, the Bacchanal Committee chose to charge for tickets to attend this event. Combined with the event capacity of 4,000 persons, this decision has caused a large subset of the student body to feel that they have been unfairly shut out of a campus-wide event.
Through a series of discussions with Student Engagement, Facilities, Public Safety, and other administrative parties, representatives from all four councils and the Activities Board at Columbia have worked with the Bacchanal Committee to make the event more open and accessible to students on campus.
The most recent proposal, finalized early in the morning on March 26th, involves opening the West Lawn and the Butler Lawn for an additional 2,000 tickets. Along with the roughly 300 tickets remaining from the main audience area, this allows up to 6,000 students to attend Bacchanal. We consider this to be a significant improvement over the status quo. Current ticket holders will be refunded, and will also have the option to release their ticket and attempt to get a lawn ticket. It is not currently expected that students will be able to hold both a standard and a lawn ticket.
However, this plan is expensive. Our current estimates are that the total cost of the Bacchanal event to the student body will be approximately $160,000, which represents 151% of the allocation that Bacchanal received from the Activities Board at Columbia. In particular, it constitutes an additional council subsidy of $54,000 over the original allocation.
After a general body vote, ESC has decided to fund this subsidy with a vote of (21 for, 3 against, 6 abstain) in ratio. This works out to $8,248.84 from the SEAS student body, or $5.20 per student.This decision does not constitute an official ESC endorsement of the circumstances that have necessitated this subsidy, nor does it imply that ESC will be willing to continue funding Bacchanal at the same level in the future. We do not take this decision lightly, and we feel that it is the option that best benefits the undergraduate engineering population at Columbia.
If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to the executive board via email at esc@columbia.edu.
Best regards,
Engineering Student Council
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24 Comments
@Anonymous #NationaliseBacchanal
#SeizeTheMeansOfConcertProduction
@The Hebrew Hammer Way to go Shensi!
@Cristen Kromm You are a dirty whore.
@Anonymous Why so many abstentions?
@Something doesn't add up... What direction is the stage going to be facing…..?
@Anonymous south
@wait what So does that mean the people who got tickets already are now going to be facing the back of the stage…?
@Anonymous the stage was changed to face butler
if it remained facing low, the cap would have been under 2,000
@Anonymoose What does this mean for student use of the lawns before/after Bacchanal? Are we going to be shut out for preparation and restoration of the lawns?
@And... what if the other councils don’t agree? How will ESC cover it all?
@Anonymous If I understand correctly (anyone on CCSC can tell me otherwise), ABC, SGA and GSSC signed on to the old proposal, so they’ll probably sign onto this one too. It’s only CCSC that’s still deliberating the new proposal.
@Anonymous GSSC is not paying
@anon source? They are refusing to pay?
@Anonymous They won’t shoulder the burden of Bacchanal’s fuck-ups.
@Anonymous Fuck all you GS grandpas. Least you can do to not look like total pricks is pull your depends up, bust out those social security checks and contribute. Seriously, you can do without a few home shopping network items and hard candies. God, why is GS even a thing?
@lol GS grandpas? seriously? the average age of the college is in the mid 20s right now lol
@CC'16 that is, the average age of those in GS is mid-20s
@Anonymous The lawns were always open! You’re telling me you want to close campus to thousands of undergrads who’ll spend the whole day drinking anyway? Where do you think they’ll go–tons of crazy dorm parties will make it much harder to reach students who need medical attention, much harder to prevent and respond to sexual assault, and raises the risk of property damage than just having us all out in public. How is it that every Bacchanal decision makes the situation exponentially worse? How is that even possible?
@Anonymous I don’t think the lawns are supposed to be open by April 4
Looks like councils, abc, bacchanal, or whoever, had to fight for them to be open for the day
http://facilities.columbia.edu/south-lawn-status
@On ESC The lawns were going to be cordoned off so no students could be on them. Peter Bailinson and Marc Heinrich pushed really hard over break, with some help from ESC, SGA, and ABC after break, to get the lawns opened.
And then the admins slapped us with this absurd $25,000 fee to open the lawns, so that they can make sure they’re spotless for Days on Campus so starry-eyed prospies think they’ll actually have a chance to hang out on them.
@woah woah woah What’s this business about “300 tickets remaining”????
@ESC member The post is missing a footnote:
“About 300 tickets were either held for the FLIP population, or recovered from invalid sales (e.g. duplicates and non-CU undergrad)”
@confused While I think it sounds like a great thing to have not charged for FLIP, why is this the first time that we are hearing about this?
The Bacchanal board is taking too many cues from the administration on transparency.
@Anonymous Seriously. Disband Bacchanal board. I thought it’d be a cold day in hell when the student councils are more transparent than a student group, and yet here we are. Time to take control of this process.