An anonymous source leaked this year’s Spring Allocations to the Carletonian. In the notes, it reads “be critical, be logical, nitpick. Leave your normal sweetness at the door.” 

In a column labelled “What to cut,” the first item reads “senior recognition.” This document is uncritical and illogical. It deserves to be known and nitpicked, with normal sweetness being left at the door for this process. 

In the “even MORE AGGRESSIVE cut” tab of the spreadsheet, there are a few standout cuts to be noted. A 32.66% cut to the Muslim Student Association resulted in cuts to the brunch for Eid al-Adha — the celebration of feasting after a month of fasting — and the Eid al-Fitr celebration and cut a net $1000 from the iftars hosted by Carleton. Muslim students already face hardships while fasting and receive very little support from the administration, as they still have to pay the same cost for the meal plan and dining hall hours are not accommodating to sunrise and sunset meals. CSA removing this kind of access for these students is a slap in the face to the community and students who rely on this funding to balance Carleton responsibilities with their deeply held faith. 

There are similarly deep cuts made to the Student Activities Programming Board (25.53%), such that the Midwinter Ball has been cut by $7000, Date Knight has been cut by $1000 and Halloween celebrations have been cut by $4000. These changes result in fewer activities, less equipment, less food and less time for these events attended by the whole campus. There are also deep cuts made to organizations that support minority groups on campus, from QTBIPOC+ (cut 62.13%), WOC+ (cut 78.96%) and Black Student Alliance (cut 42.29%). The trend continues with practically all of Carleton’s major publications, with the Clap, Cow Print and Manuscript budgets all being cut in half. The Carletonian will also be forced to cut one issue per term, with the potential for further cuts should the CSA decide that to be in their best interest, and with some senators expressing a willingness to axe the paper entirely. I’m not entirely sure what’s left for us next year, with practically all events and organizations being left as fiscally hollowed-out shells of their former selves.

I could fill the entire rest of the article with a play-by-play of all the ridiculous cuts CSA has made to all the organizations that make the campus as tolerable as it is, but I want to hone in on two main points. First, CSA lacks financial transparency. The fact that this information had to be leaked for it to be disseminated by the Carletonian shows a clear gap in communication that exists solely to the CSA’s benefit. Students in general do not know what cuts were made or why. These notes are restricted to internal use only, and the budget committee continues to shirk its duties in reporting its minutes, making it impossible to track these changes if you are outside CSA. The statistics year by year are not known to anyone outside the CSA; we don’t know how large the deficit is and what prompted these extreme cuts. What has increased are the funds that CSA itself holds at its discretion. The Treasurer’s Discretionary Fund has increased from $2000 in 2020 to $8000 in 2025, the Senator Access Fund continues to receive an annual $5000 and executive pay accounts for $20,000 of the CSA budget. 

Why are cultural organizations on the frontlines of cuts and not the slush funds of CSA that are never reported on, and that we never see any real benefit from? For all the campaign promises of transparency and newsletters, CSA continues to hide behind the shield of “just balancing the books” while providing no further information about the decision-making processes or even who is on the budget committee. It is a box that our money disappears into, and now we don’t even get anything out of that box.

There is also a philosophical disagreement in the nature of how CSA should be run. Fiscal responsibility and balancing the budget are both important, but CSA does not exist for itself. Itt is an extension of and representative of the student body and should work for its benefit. How does massively cutting funding for community-building cultural events and student-run publications that students put their time and selves into for the benefit of the campus, with no compensation square with CSA;s mission of serving campus? There are myriad ways these events could have occurred differently: sending out comprehensive fiscal information, properly cataloguing budget committee meetings, expressing clear concerns about budget sustainability or wasteful spending by orgs, meeting more often with student leaders to get their input or creating a phased plan to address the budgetary concerns over time rather than slashing everything in a DOGE-like frenzy. None of that happened, and the unilateral decisions of CSA have now set up an academic year 2025-26 that will be bereft of many beautiful and important events and organizations that make this campus what it is. We don’t even know where any of this money is going now that the cuts have been made. I hope the numbers on the spreadsheets were worth it. 

Second, there is the question of executive pay. There has been no indication of a reduction in the CSA activity fee, it has never been reduced historically, and it will likely be increased again next year under the ambit of inflation and “balancing the budget.” We are paying more and more to receive less and less from CSA. I was off-campus for the vote on executive pay last term, but on reading back through the minutes on Jan. 20, 2025, it pains me to read that the justification for this massive allocation of funds was to increase CSA executive accountability. What accountability is there for the CSA’s decisions? How does this compensation result in better work when the work that has been done up to this point has been to the wider student body’s detriment? CSA cannot have it both ways. 

Either the deficit is so overwhelmingly bad that any additional cost, especially administrative expenses that benefit the few such as the Treasurer’s Discretionary Fund and executive pay, cannot be justified and must be excised from the budget, or the deficit can be managed without the extremity of measures that CSA has taken (indicated by the over $30,000 in executive pay and other discretionary funds that CSA maintains in spite of cuts everywhere else) in which case what they are doing is entirely unjustified. We’ll never know which it is, because CSA continues to remain an opaque organization committed solely to maintaining a wall of silence with the student body it claims to represent.

I want to finally appeal to current times. In terms of our publications, student newspapers are not beholden to the same financial interests that prevent mainstream journalism from accurately covering news, and are a democratic platform wherein anyone can submit articles. To lose that now, and to open the gate for their total erasure later on, is a grave mistake and a massive setback for the dwindling power of students at Carleton and across this country. CSA may have abdicated its actual decision-making power to the administration, but publications like the Carletonian (and even the CLAP) are some of the last remaining avenues for students to express their voices both inside and outside of Carleton. In regard to minority-run organizations that have received cuts, there is no worse time for CSA to be making these cuts when attacks on DEI and community-support programs are already taking place. In a world rife with forces trying to break apart our joy and communities, Carleton is the last place where we should have had to worry about it happening. CSA is killing the Carleton community, in every conceivable way, with the way it has decided to prioritize our funds. Don’t let them get away with it quietly.