Freeze Magazine, the steamy, self-purportedly escapist publication for Harvard’s modern woman, is currently on thin ice.
The brainchild of Thea L. Sebastian ’08, Freeze was designed to mirror the New York glossies that often captivate the eyes of the young fashionable set, its cheerful irreverence seemingly providing a welcome change from Harvard’s myriad of formidable journals. “Tis the Season for Steamy Sex,” the cover declared in sans serif font—a promise of deliciously apolitical content within. But Sebastian soon learned that a fresh and original theme could only take a new publication so far.
Freeze never had the chance to vie for doorbox space with Harvard’s other publications. Suffering from insufficient funds, the organization was unable to doordrop its winter 2005 magazine, which was instead sold in the Harvard Coop at $2.95 a pop. And this was not only Freeze’s debut issue—it was the single issue the organization has been able to produce to date.
For those Harvard students who choose to create an organization of their own, the financial complications that inevitably ensue are a rude awakening. Freeze was intended to fill a niche that Sebastian felt was ignored by the other publications at Harvard, but the unglamorous truth is that, unfortunately, absence does not necessarily signify a need—according to Harvard’s purse strings, that is.
On a campus where student groups are constantly vying for a limited pool of resources, the survival of a student-run extracurricular often becomes dependent on the benevolence of private donors, one-time grants and personal generosity. The question becomes, however, how long can student groups survive without financial support from the University? And perhaps more importantly, should they have to?
STUDENT RUN, STUDENT FUNDED
Magazines traditionally finance themselves by selling advertisement space to local businesses. Unfortunately for Freeze, this option is hardly open to publications that have yet to put out their first issue.
“Advertisers like to see a hard copy of the magazine,” Sebastian says. “You’re simply not going to be credible if all you can offer them is an empty promise and a layout design for the cover.”
In order to remedy the challenges of insufficient capital, Sebastian turned to the Harvard Campus Grant system to supplement the more conventional avenue of advertisements. The common grant application allows student groups to apply for direct grants from various departments of the University, each affiliated with a particular mission, as well as from the Undergraduate Council. But after weathering the complicated and stressful application process, Sebastian met another financial pitfall when grant after grant was returned with the seal of rejection.
“Our application wasn’t very strong,” Sebastian says. “Since Freeze is a lifestyle magazine, we didn’t know anything about business.”
Sebastian, who declined to say whether Freeze had made enough of a profit to cover her initial investment, spent over $8,000 of her own money on the first issue of her magazine.
The practice of drawing from personal bank accounts is hardly unique to Freeze Magazine. The officers of the Mock Trial Team have a long tradition of paying for tournament expenses out of their own pockets and then later reimbursing themselves through fundraisers. “Normally, by spring we’ve already exhausted the funds that we’ve collected from membership dues,” Special Operations Officer Matthew S. Roller ’08 explains. “At that point in time, the easiest way to purchase plane tickets or hotel rooms is for one member to purchase them all with the understanding that they will be paid back.”
This reimbursement can take months, simply because the team lacks the money to repay its officers. And after a brief perusal of the grants listed in the Student Organizations Handbook, it becomes clear that groups that fall outside of the particular arenas of women’s issues, public service, race relations, the arts, and politics rarely qualify for assistance from the University, forcing these groups to bear the financial troubles on their own.
WALKING A LONELY ROAD
The financial alternatives offered by the University are scant. Funds are limited, and when operating under a system of grants with finite resources, it is inevitable that certain groups will be left out. Associate Dean of Student Life and Activities Judith H. Kidd explains the limitations of the Grant system.
“There are some student organizations that don’t fall under any of the common grants,” Kidd says. “[However] we do—in terms of how they can do fundraising events—point out Dorm Crew opportunities.”
Dorm Crew opportunities: an option detailed in the Student Organizations Handbook urging student groups to employ their members in Dorm Crew, in order to donate the wages to their organization. If this option doesn’t seem too tantalizing, it’s scarcely surprising to see that student groups accumulate debt so quickly.
Stefanie L. Plant ’05, who was business manager of Diversity and Distinction Magazine from 2002 to 2003, inherited a magazine that was about $10,000 in debt. “The editor-in-chief told me that they had been ignoring calls from the printer,” she recalls. “We had been working with a new printer because we hadn’t yet paid off the old one.”
Facing the daunting problem of managing a debt-ridden organization, Plant found that the only way to pay back the old debts was to publish new issues—which, of course, meant incurring more debts. Frustrated by the old guard who passed on their embattled debts, Plant says, she quickly fell into a deeper hole. Yet still, she shied away from approaching the Student Activities Office for guidance. [SEE EDITOR'S NOTE BELOW]
“The situation was so dire that we were afraid that the organization would be disbanded or reprimanded for being so financially strapped.”
NOT ALL STUDENT GROUPS ARE CREATED EQUAL
There is no question that this go-it-alone strategy is more effective for certain types of student groups. The Mock Trial Team is in a unique position, as it relies mainly on individual donations, often from wealthy relatives, for its $20,000 a year expenses. “Because we’re a really specialized organization, we have trouble finding grants from outside sources,” Roller explains.
The majority of the Mock Trial Team’s expenses are spent on airplane tickets and hotel rooms, which are necessary for members to attend tournaments around the country. Since the Undergraduate Council does not fund transportation expenses beyond the cost of a T-token, the Mock Trial Team can only use UC grants for the relatively negligible registration expenses that it incurs at each tournament.
Finance Committee Chair of the Undergraduate Council and Crimson editor Alexander N. Li ’08 sympathizes with the plight of the Mock Trial Team, but insists that the UC is at the end of its tether, thus putting Mock Trial outside of the direct criteria for UC grant funding.
“Our resources are just so limited,” Li says. “This year, we’re at 950 projects funded up to this week. We just can’t afford to fund these long trips that are extensive. Ultimately someone should step up and say ‘this is important, we should help you.’” But exactly who will provide this extra aid, Li cannot say.
The UC refuses to give free rides, and for an academic team like Mock Trial, this becomes just another road block in sustaining an active organization. In a group merely ten years old, relying on a network of alumni becomes impossible—especially considering that the organization has a history of struggling to provide the most elementary of services to its members.
Co-Captain William E. Cooper ’08 expressed indignation at the financial troubles that the Mock Trial Team is forced to endure. “I am very disappointed in the University—I find it a little bit outrageous that the University has this tremendous endowment and can’t manage to throw a few thousand dollars our way,” he says.
“I think what was particularly galling about it is that we are one of the top programs in the country—we are currently ranked number 2 out of about 600 teams. And we can barely afford to compete!”
The Mock Trial Team’s financial position has been placed in an even more precarious arena by the recent collapse of an avenue of funding that had propped up the organization for the past couple of years. According to Mock Trial team member Daniel L. Goodkin ’06, whose grandfather donated over $20,000 to the organization over the period of two years, after he graduated, the monthly checks from his grandfather stopped.
“The bottom line was the rich granddad said that the register was empty,” Cooper says.
This development forced the team to pursue increasingly elaborate fundraising initiatives—from an invitational tournament called the Crimson Classic, to a series of training seminars for high school students involved in mock trial teams.
Frankie Chen ’07, co-editor-in-chief of Diversity and Distinction, recalls that a similar dependence on a single funding source was the primary reason for his organization’s problems with solvency. “We were relying on one privatized sponsor, and when that advertiser went out of business, a critical source of our income just evaporated,” Chen says.
[SEE EDITOR'S NOTE BELOW]
Diversity and Distinction continued to print one or two advertisements in each issue in a weak parody of the layout of a healthy publication. The magazine was no longer receiving any money for the advertisements, which were usually dated, so they were included purely for appearance’s sake.
“I DON’T HAVE A RICH UNCLE”
But even for those groups not subject to the vagaries of familial favor, the long-term unreliability of funding sources remains an inescapable problem that must be dealt with continuously. In the spring of 2006, the Mission Hill After School Program was shaken to its foundations by a political transition in the Undergraduate Council. Year after year, Mission Hill had received the same amount of money from the UC. Suddenly, the new Financial Committee decreed that Mission Hill would receive zero dollars of funding that semester.
“It caught everyone off guard,” says Ajay G. Kumar ’08, administrative director of Mission Hill. “When people were depending on one source of income and that source fell through, they needed to rethink how they were being funded.”
The Mission Hill Program’s main costs are incurred in the transportation of members to the Roxbury, Mass. neighborhood where they act as counselors for children with limited educational opportunities. The problem was, again, the UC’s resistance towards funding transportation. The new guard of the Financial Committee was unwilling to make an exception for Mission Hill. And when forced, with the advent of lost funds, to leave their charity work behind and become hard-edged lobbyists in front of a financial committee, Mission Hill came to a certain crisis of identity. Could a charity organization possibly rally to compete against the bureaucratic hang-ups of the student government?
The jarring difference between the $2,500 that the group had requested and the big nothing that they were slated to receive was eventually mitigated. In a general vote, the Undergraduate Council overturned the Financial Committee’s original decision. In the end, the Mission Hill program received $2,000—an amount considerably less than what the group needed, but still better than nothing.
As part of the Phillip Brooks House Association, Mission Hill was able to mobilize a veritable army of supporters to attend the meeting that would decide its fate. “Because we got about 80 or 90 people out to the UC meeting, we weren’t in as bad of a boat as other groups,” Kumar says. Smaller organizations don’t have this luxury, and so they have no means of fighting back.
THE MORE THE BETTER?
“The Committee on College Life…is mainly interested in approving student groups that can be financially and programmatically sustainable from year to year,” states the Student Organizations Handbook. But when the Mock Trial Team was recognized as a Harvard student group two years ago, Roller found he encountered little resistence in his attempt to be recognized as an organization. “From the organizations that I’m involved in, it seems pretty easy to get recognized,” he says. “You just need a few faculty sponsors—who really don’t even have to be involved—a constitution, and a few members.”
The University’s open attitude toward new student groups explains the huge number of undergraduate organizations on campus. This profusion is, however, a mixed blessing. “I know that they’re always getting new student groups, so I’m not sure that it’s a sustainable model,” Plant says. “The University’s going to have to devote money to keeping the existing associations afloat, and to funding the new ones.”
But from the administration’s perspective, the answer to this age-old problem of depleted funds is to instead re-evaluate the importance of these embattled student groups.
“Financial difficulties can come from the fact that what they’re trying to do is something that no one else on campus is interested in,” Dean Kidd says. “Others get into trouble because their eyes are bigger than their stomach.”
However, from the perspective of some students, the more viable solution is to take pressure off of the student groups, and to convince the administration that extracurriculars are not a luxury indicative of an over-ambitious student body, but worthwhile initiatives deserving of University funding.
Amadi P. Anene ’08 was on the Committee on College Life for nearly a year, where he observed the financial troubles that plague many student groups. Understanding that funds for student groups are limited, Anene still feels reluctant to condemn the student body in its ambitious attempts to expand the somewhat stagnant environment of extracurricular life at Harvard.
“We’re at one of the most wealthy institutions in the world, and here we are struggling to fund some of the organizations that we put so much time into,” Anene says.
“I think it’s a matter of the University making it a priority,” he concludes. “They want the UC to do everything while they do nothing.”
FINDING A HAPPY MEDIUM
Roller seems resigned to the infeasibility of receiving grant money from the University. “I know that we’ve made the College aware of our financial difficulties, but there’s not much that they can do,” he says. This sentiment is not far removed from Plant’s reluctance to ask the Student Activities Office for guidance, and it might be true that Harvard students are simply too independent for their own good. But the administration is hardly ready to change its policies to ensure that the Mock Trial Team can receive money from direct grants rather than from indulgent relatives. Aggressive action to achieve a cooperative atmosphere between students and the administration is something that is missing from both sides.
Student group leaders take pride in their self-sufficiency, and the administration is generally unwilling to interfere in their endeavors. These are both positive qualities of the Harvard experience. Yet there is a happy medium between complete independence and utter control—a medium that has yet to be found.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The April 12 magazine cover story "Endangered Harvard Species"
contained several errors. First, the article's title incorrectly
implied that Diversity and Distinction magazine currently faced
financial troubles. In fact, the group has overcome the debts that
plagued it seven years ago. Second, the story incorrectly stated
that the decision of the magazine to print more issues caused the group
to incur more debt. In fact, while printing more issues initially
resulted in additional costs, it did not increase the group's debt.
Third, the article incorrectly implied that Stefanie L. Plant '05, a
former business manager, said that the magazine fell into a deeper hole
as a result of printing more issues. In fact, Plant noted that after
printing four issues, the group had repaid its $10,000 worth of debt.
Fourth, the article did not correctly contextualize comments by Frankie
Chen '07, co-editor-in-chief of the magazine. Chen's comments about the
magazine's dependence on a single source of funding referred to the
publication's behavior in 2000, not the present day. Finally, the
article should have mentioned that Diversity and Distinction receives
grants from the Harvard Foundation, the Undergraduate Council, the Office for the Arts, and the
Ann Radcliffe Trust.
