One year ago this month, a group of students submitted a proposal for a mid-winter event meant to rival Dillo Day in size and ability to unify the Northwestern community. The administration had agreed to contribute $100,000 for this event, but in January, the administration pulled that funding, citing financial reasons and the students’ failure to meet deadlines.
Mid-Winter Event
In a joint interview, Undergraduate Budget Priorities Committee Chair Jonathan Kent, ASG President Neal Sales-Griffin, A&O Productions Chair Syd Cohen and Winter Programming Board Chair Forrest Wickman outlined the organizational difficulties, leadership uncertainty and time and money constraints that led up to the pulled funding.
Early confusion
In February 2008, the UBPC went to the administration on behalf of students with a list of proposals they wanted to see funded. One such proposal was a mid-winter event.
In late April, the administration approved the idea, and offered to set aside between $100,000 and $200,000.
At the time, the event was intended to be a “collaborative effort” between student groups, according to Kent.
The proposal contained two parts: a Selection Committee to oversee everything, and a Winter Programming Board to execute and plan the event.
“We started to come up with the group of people that should serve on that committee,” Kent said. “[But] the language of the proposal [for the event] was ambiguous, especially in how the committee is structured and even who among the students, who among the administration and who among the faculty should play what roles.”
According to Cohen, the original proposal did not contain “a lot of talk about the actual implementation of the event.” It did not specify who would be producing the event; rather, there was an outline of who would come together to choose what the event would be.
The proposal’s vagueness triggered the series of problems they encountered further down the line, Cohen and the other student leaders said.
Coming to the table
By the beginning of Fall Quarter, “people were wondering what was going to happen,” Sales-Griffin said.
There were informal discussions, and Kent tried in October to get students from a variety of groups on campus to move forward with the process of submitting ideas for the event, but student planners weren’t sure how to make progress with formal plans.
“We all kind of knew who should be sitting at the table,” Cohen said. “But no one knew who was supposed to be getting them to the table.”
The Selection Committee held its first meeting on Oct. 31. The committee was made up of the ASG president, executive vice president and financial vice president, as well as representatives from the Residence Hall Association, Residential College Board, Panhellenic Council, Interfraternity Council, Mayfest, A&O and UBPC.
Vice President of Student Affairs William Banis and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education Ronald Braeutigam retained monetary control over the event, although Braeutigam said in an e-mail that Banis was “more directly involved in the detailed discussions about the Winter event.” Banis said in an interview that he considered himself a liaison between the event’s planners and the university.
“I think my role was to serve as a conduit between the Central Budget Committee and students who proposed the program,” he said. “We also tried to serve a role to facilitate moving things along without running the process. I saw this as a student-initiated event.”
The first priority of the committee was to create a structure to make the event self-sustaining so that people could rise within the ranks and produce the event in the future, student leaders said. “Based on the structures of Mayfest, A&O and DM, we created the Winter Programming structure, with the head being the Winter Programming Board Chair,” Cohen said.
In the future, Cohen explained, the board would ideally have an application process for its chair. Given the time constraints this time, the board chose Weinberg senior Forrest Wickman, A&O’s director of concerts. The board created two other positions, naming McCormick senior Bryan Cowan as director of production, and Weinberg junior Adam Pumm as director of talent buyers.
“The first thing I wanted to do in order to make the event as large and unique as possible was to explore whether we could co-sponsor this event in conjunction with other groups,” Wickman said.
He approached multiple groups but only solidified a co-sponsorship with A&O, saying that they had “the most expertise and funding to contribute.” This arrangement was then brought to the Selection Committee.
The search for an act
Meanwhile, A&O had been making inquiries regarding its own winter speaker, and Pumm, who is also an A&O member, continued acquiring price estimates and contacting potential acts about their availability. A&O got involved with the mid-winter event and the administration approved its co-sponsorship of the event by the end of November. The mid-winter event was tentatively scheduled for the first weekend of February, giving the Winter Programming Board more than nine weeks to plan the event.
“The only event comparable to this in size is Dillo Day,” Wickman said. “Mayfest starts booking Dillo Day in November, six months ahead of time. We were aware that we very tight on time, but we were also aware that it was feasible to book and produce the event.”
The board put out offers as soon as it could, but faced yet another stumbling block. A&O had to go the Student Activities Finance Board to petition to transfer $70,705 of its funds to the mid-winter Event budget. Everyone involved worked quickly to rush that process along, according to Wickman, so they could know the exact amount of money they had at their disposal before sending out an offer on Dec. 12.
But they encountered another obstacle: the holiday season.
“That’s where I think most of the breakdown occurred, because we ran into people being away for the holiday, and not returning calls, and not getting back to us in a timely manner,” Banis said.
Time runs out
Once classes began again in January, the administration pulled its funding, saying that there was no longer sufficient time to produce the event. The administration had granted the board three extensions to contact agents during the holiday season, but ultimately felt that one month before the event was not enough time to finalize contracts and production.
“We just kind of ran out of time,” Banis said.
Board members said they understood the university’s reasoning. “There are two things that you need to do,” Wickman explained. “Assemble all production details in time […] and handle all the contracts in time.”
The board met with Banis on Jan. 26 to go over what had happened during the preceding couple of months.
“We walked away with a couple understandings,” Kent said. “One is that the money that was supposed to go into this event is not going to be used this year. The university is using it to pay down debt.”
“As far as the future of this event, we are going to do a follow-up in terms of recommendations as far as how this should be executed in the future and present it to the administration,” he added.
Banis said that the event’s future depends on Northwestern’s uncertain financial situation. “I think the state of the economy and the impact it’s having on the university will be the biggest determining factor,” he said.
Kent acknowledged that tough economic times make it unclear whether the event will take place next year. He and the other student leaders are hoping to get an answer from the university regarding the issue by April.
Looking for answers
Kent said that he sympathized with students who were displeased about the event’s cancellation.
“Student disappointment [...] is completely warranted and justified,” Kent said.
The interviewed student leaders said they felt that the ultimate failure of the mid-winter event was not caused by one specific student group, but was the result of a series of setbacks.
Banis concurred. “I don’t know if I would say things had gone wrong. It is what it is and I think people put in a good deal of effort.”
“One of the good things that came out of this was the possibility of pulling together a student, faculty and staff programming advisory board to look at major events and to make sure that we’re providing balance in the offerings to our students,” Banis added. “So I think there was good that came out of it.”
When news of the event’s failure broke, ASG became a target of criticism, which Sales-Griffin said was unwarranted.
“A lot of people in my organization […] would come to me and they had been reprimanded, sent nasty emails [and been] yelled at. It was really tough for me,” Sales-Griffin said. “ASG never had any control or influence in the process as an organization. I was involved through UBPC but [ASG] and its members didn’t touch this.”
“If this was student money, from the Student Activities Fund, this would have already been done,” he added. “The problem was [that] the students were the actors, while the administration was holding the funds.”
There was a big discrepancy, Sales-Griffin explained, between who was in control, who had access to funds and who was able to act.
“The haste in movement was capped by this being the first time the administration was allocating that kind of capital for something that was meant to be student led,” he said.
Chloe Benoist contributed reporting.