If you ask students how many times they’ve opened their Chanticleer yearbooks, periodically handed out free on the West Campus Plaza, it’s safe to say a substantial majority will give you a number in the low single digits. For many, that digit will be zero.
But for such a sparsely used product, The Chanticleer receives a colossal amount of funding and seems to be subject to a different set of funding rules than other student groups. With more than $109,000 allocated for the 2009-2010 school year, the yearbook receives 17.2 percent of all Student Organization Finance Committee allocated funds (and that was after a budget cut!). In recent years, Duke Student Government has made repeated attempts to gradually cut the yearbook budget.
As we approach this year’s SOFC budgeting season, DSG needs to finally wield the fiscal axe to cut The Chanticleer budget dramatically and make students pay for their yearbooks.
The reasons why are simple enough. For one, students value a free product less than one they buy. To that end, student activity fees should be spent on experiences students value while they are still at Duke, rather than on keepsakes which students may or may not actually keep. Campus life could be visibly improved by reallocating the massive chunk of funding The Chanticleer receives to student groups with a record of producing consistent and effective programming.
The Chanticleer prints 4,500 copies a year, according to an April 2009 Chronicle article. Yet many of those go unclaimed. Stacks remain piled in the Undergraduate Publications Board office in the Bryan Center, on the supposition that someday alumni who never got one will come by to pick one up.
Meanwhile, put The Chanticleer’s funding numbers in perspective: Club sports received $80,000 this year; the four big campus cultural groups (Asian Students Association, Black Student Alliance, Mi Gente and Diya) received $37,619.65 combined. Both sets of organizations have a much broader impact in engaging the student body on a day-to-day basis, which is what the student activities fee is intended to support.
DSG needs to take this funding issue seriously. There are only about $640,000 accessible to all student groups. Organizations big and small spend the year jockeying for funding from various entities. Yet more than 100 grand of funding is walled off to generate a product few use. Students should take offense at this. The Chanticleer is not entitled to current funding levels simply because they have always been this high.
Chanticleer editor-in-chief Taylor Martyn, a senior, defended the practice of giving away free yearbooks on the grounds of “equal access,” a goal he suggested could best be accomplished through the student activities fee.
Among the arguments leveled in support of free yearbooks, I find this egalitarian one the most unconvincing. Charging students to pay for the yearbook, the thinking goes, discriminates against lower income students in favor of those who can afford to pay. This is well and good, except for the fact that this reasoning could apply to pretty much everything. Should class rings be free? Diploma frames? It’s unclear when and why the yearbook was anointed the keepsake king.
Even if not all students will be able to afford a yearbook, that is not so much worse than handing them out for free to serve as bookends. Instead, students who do not purchase a yearbook up front could obtain one later from The Chanticleer, just as they may order a class ring even after they have graduated.
At some point, it’s just not fair to other student groups to continue funding The Chanticleer at these levels without requiring serious fiscal reform. According to SOFC Chairman David Hu, the Chanticleer should expect another $25,000 cut this year. That’s a step in the right direction.
But gradual cuts won’t do, and other student groups should not tolerate them. This is their funding which is being monopolized and the strategy of delay has clear opportunity costs. The only way the yearbook will find another business model is if DSG cuts its funding, in the order of some $90-100,000 on par with other student groups with high expenses, and The Chanticleer is forced to adapt.
And it’s not like yearbooks won’t exist if they’re not subsidized and handed out. Few other universities give away yearbooks for free. Most of us who went to high school in the U.S. had to buy our yearbooks. I still look fondly back on mine from time to time. But I always had to pay for them, and the purchasing of the yearbook was embedded within a larger social experience of signing books of friends. Ultimately, it was this experience that gave it the most value.
Requiring students to buy their yearbooks could not only see the rise of a similar culture at Duke, but it could also see the added benefit of a more marketable final yearbook. If The Chanticleer is a product to be sold it could become more user-friendly, designed for students to create memories with, rather than to collect dust on a shelf.
So in this year’s SOFC’s budgeting process, student leaders should resist the temptation to romanticize the yearbook. The Chanticleer is a student organization like any other. It should be subject to the same rules.
Vikram Srinivasan is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Thursday.
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