Kathy Gilsinan

VIEW FAiR'S PETITION

he weather for FAiR's Saturday speak-out in March proved inauspicious, but the climate couldn't be better for the student coalition prodding Columbia's administration to reform financial aid. With four of the eight Ivies having instituted sweeping financial aid reform packages in the past five years, often eliminating loans in favor of grants, Columbia's competitiveness depends on instituting similar measures with alacrity, and administrators know it. Financial aid reform is the cornerstone of Columbia's current capital campaign, and Dean Quigley has been promising to replace loans with grants for at least four years.

So what's FAiR's problem? Why did FAiR's platform receive 1,100 signatures those of about one-fifth of the undergraduate student body during its petition drive? If their demands basically correspond to the administration's promises, what's the big deal?

Wayne Ting has an idea. When he took his first steps into Columbia's political limelight four years ago, running for Class of 2006 representative with the Party ON ticket, the centerpiece of his platform was his ambition to replace loans with grants. His rationale was simple: Columbia can afford this. Whether or not anyone thought a first-year representative capable of pulling off such a feat, he got into office and sent, with the backing of the council, some financial aid suggestions to the administration. He received an enthusiastic response from Dean Quigley. The administration, according to Quigley's letter, wanted to replace loans with grants “as fast as we can.”

Ting recounts being satisfied at having secured this promise. He settled back to wait for what he thought would be the short period it would take for the administration to economically diversify the student body and dole out opportunity with a wave of Columbia's considerable checkbook.

The following year, he defended to his fellow council members the administration's seeming inaction on the subject of financial aid, urging patience. After all, Quigley had given his word.

Ting is about to graduate and is still waiting. And perhaps the half of Columbia's undergraduate student body that is on financial aid is waiting, too.

It may be a while yet, theorizes Ting. Since financial aid is the cornerstone of Columbia's current capital campaign, it doesn't make any sense for Columbia to replace loans with grants while simultaneously conveying a sense of urgency about the financial aid situation to those who might contribute to the capital campaign. There are years remaining for Columbia to plead on the basis of its financial aid ambitions, and such pleading might be less lucrative if one of its main objectives, the replacement of loans with grants, is realized too soon. Ting predicts that financial aid reform will come close to the end of the capital campaign, and meanwhile the administration will make noises in support of, but will hardly consider, student input. “Whoever is student council president at the time will claim victory [for the reform],” he adds with a laugh.

The $400 million capital campaign that Columbia is currently undertaking has the stated goal of endowing financial aid in perpetuity. The cash thus garnered will be placed in an endowment all its own, the capital gains from which will pay for eliminating loans in favor of grants while maintaining need-blind admissions.

Great, thinks Izumi Devalier, a founding member of FAiR and vice president for policy in Columbia College Student Council (CCSC). But there is an indeterminate schedule for cajoling $400 million out of the pockets of alums, and in the meantime, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have all recently announced that they will require no tuition contributions from families in a certain income bracket. FAiR hopes to introduce a similar income-targeted system at Columbia that will eliminate tuition contributions from families earning less than $45,000 a year. But if it has to wait, say, five years, with all the other Ivies engaged in a bidding war for low-income, qualified students, it may drop in the rankings before it reaches its goal.

And according to FAiR, while a financial aid endowment is swell for a long-term plan, Columbia can afford to change financial aid now, if only it would prioritize it. In March, the University of Pennsylvania, with an endowment of $4.3 billion (one billion less than Columbia's supposedly pitiful $5.4 billion endowment), announced that it would replace loans with grants for qualified families earning under $50,000 a year. This development was a coup for FAiR at Columbia, putting a kink in the Columbia administration's protestations that its endowment is too small to effect change. If Penn can afford it, the rationale goes, Columbia's endowment-envy is no suitable excuse for postponing financial aid reform.

But Penn's financial aid reform isn't a copy of the programs at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. First of all, its source of funding is different. Penn will pay for this new package out of its operating budget, the money allotted for the university's day-to-day expenses. A portion of the budget is paid for by tuition, which will rise 5.4 percent at Penn next year, to $43,960. The rise is due, in part, to the cost of the financial aid change. Furthermore, eliminating loans in the financial aid packages of students from families earning under $50,000 a year does not actually mean that all of these families will receive financial aid, just that those who do will get grants instead of loans.

This model shifts the burden to middle-income families, noted Devalier, and if this is the small-endowment strategy, FAiR isn't interested. At a recent meeting that members of FAiR had with financial aid administrators, a plan was unveiled to “accelerate” the capital campaign, making a large initial push for $150 million immediately, keeping $400 million as the longer-term goal.

Repeated calls to Columbia's Office of Financial Aid were eventually directed back to Devalier. Meetings notwithstanding, however, no one has told her when the capital campaign was expected to be completed, how “immediate” would be the immediate push for $150 million, or what that initial donation would be used for.

FAiR is, as yet, an unrecognized student group, and is in some ways uninterested in recognition. The kind of recognition it hesitates to seek is from the Activities Board, which requires a group to have a constitution and elected officers, and would, in the estimation of several FAiR members, compromise FAiR's deliberately non-hierarchical structure. But the recognition it does crave is from high-level administrators, who in responding to FAiR, when they do so, have yet to use the group's name.

FAiR is a broad coalition of already-existing activist and cultural groups on campus, with participation from Columbia College Student Council, as well as Chicano Caucus, Working Families Party, Students for Economic and Environmental Justice (SEEJ), the College Democrats, and the Black Student Organization. Since many of these groups, particularly SEEJ and Chicano Caucus, were working on financial aid issues anyway, they began to coalesce around a reform proposal in September, but the meta-activist group that resulted didn't get much attention until the petition drive held in March. In the meantime, members sent out hundreds of questionnaires to formulate a platform that they felt was appropriately responsive to student needs. Within a week, the petition had over 1,000 student signatures attached to it, out of an undergraduate population of 5,000. Petition and signatures were duly dispatched to President Bollinger.

The centerpiece of the FAiR platform is the elimination of financial contributions from families making less than $45,000 a year, and some of the trimmings include making book stipends available, increasing work-study opportunities (including subsidizing unpaid internships), and instituting a need-blind admissions policy for international students, proposals inspired by financial aid reform packages at other Ivy League schools. It's unclear how much all this would cost, and while this may seem to be a liability for FAiR's proposals, it is, in fact, another part of the platform. It is, after all, according to FAiR members, the lack of transparency in Columbia's financial dealings that makes it so hard to work out the price tag and examine whether or not Columbia can afford to reform.

Circumstantial evidence informs the suspicion that it can. According to some estimates, Penn's financial aid reform will cost between $2 million and $3 million a year, which doesn't seem like a lot. The problem, says Seth Flaxman, who was recently elected president of CCSC, is that the student council, in putting forward such proposals, needs to be sure that these proposals are feasible. But without information about Columbia's finances, it would be hard to prove feasibility one way or the other. “If we can come up with a feasible proposal ... then we would expect the administration to implement it,” says Flaxman.

Emily Bean, who shies away from calling herself the “leader” of the non-hierarchical FAiR, but sends out many of FAiR's emails, was a little bit disappointed at the turnout for April's FAiR speak-out. The rain had concluded shortly before the speak-out was to begin, but the sky was threatening, and there weren't very many people outdoors. A knot of 100 to 200 enthusiasts clustered around Low Plaza, a few chalking tall “FAiR” emblems on the bricks in bright colors; Sidik Fofana freestyled about not wanting to graduate buried in debt; the Onyx dance troupe performed to “You Don't Have to Be Rich (to be my Girl)”; a ring of tables, each with a sign proclaiming the name of an activist group represented in FAiR, marked off the makeshift performance space on Low Plaza.

Bean had invited several administrators, but none, to her knowledge, showed up, and only Bollinger's office contacted Bean to say he wouldn't be able to attend because he would be in China. A few FAiR members were distributing postcards for signatures, notes to be sent to President Bollinger requesting, in effect, that he take the coalition seriously. A previous letter to President Bollinger, outlining FAiR's platform and the support it had received from one-fifth of the student body, garnered Bollinger's polite delegation of the issue to Chris Colombo, Dean of Student Affairs, and David Charlow, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid. Meetings resulted, which included going over the FAiR platform and discussing Columbia's financial aid website. In Bean's view, the meetings failed to deal with the real issues, and she was irritated.

Tom Fazzio, SEAS '06 and Engineering Student Council (ESC) president, took a more optimistic view as a student council participant in the meetings. “They really have extended a hand for us to cooperate with them,” he said of the administration. In his view, the goals of the administration are just about coterminous with those of FAiR, but “we're working out the timeline right now.”

Bean knows that the goals of FAiR and those of the administration are basically the same, but to her, the length of the timeline indicates the administration's priorities. Financial aid, she thinks, isn't one of them, and she hopes to change that.

At a FAiR meeting on a Monday night, the idea of civil disobedience was discussed among the six or seven group members who showed up. They agreed that civil disobedience would be a last resort upon reaching a deadlock in negotiations; the fact that, in their view, negotiations haven't really even started may postpone dramatic action indefinitely. Furthermore, the penalties for civil disobedience at Columbia can be severe, but it's not clear which punishments go with which actions. Penalties can include suspension, expulsion, and ironically, revocation of financial aid.

FAiR's task, should it come to this, would be to find a vocabulary of protest similar to the protest's goals. A hunger strike was suggested, to communicate something along the lines of: “Look how many people can't afford to eat because of high tuition!”

The hunger strike, in addition to being non-punishable, has a record of success. Columbia's Center for Race and Ethnicity was founded after a student hunger strike in 1996. “They're not gonna let Columbia students die,” noted Bean.

“Yeah,” said another participant, “but who's going to fast to the point of...”

“You are!” Bean laughed.

It was decided that this almost certainly wouldn't be necessary. But just in case, Devalier giggled, “let's fatten up for the summer and talk about it in September.”