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BY JEFF DAVIDSON

In print | Published February 10, 2011

The Bi-College News, the weekly print newspaper shared by Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, is stuck in the middle of a heated policy issue that has finally boiled over. Instead of stacks of freshly printed papers filling their campus corners Tuesday morning, a note from the Bi-Co staff informed would-be readers that the paper is on hold until further notice.

The issue at hand is an antiquated rule that states that a student group cannot get funding from both Haverford and Bryn Mawr, even if, like the Bi-Co and many other groups at the close-knit schools, students from both colleges participate in it.

The rule was created in the ‘90s to prevent student groups from abusing the system. As a result of its creation, the Self Government Association (SGA) which handles funding at Bryn Mawr and Students’ Council which handles it at Haverford agreed to split the major costs that are incurred by bi-college groups. Haverford took the funding for the WHRC radio station and the movie-making club, and Bryn Mawr took the Bi-Co News.

Now that WHRC has drastically reduced its costs by going online and the movie-making club was disbanded, there is a huge disparity in how much each college’s group funding sources are paying, even though the benefits are received by both campuses.

According to Bi-Co co-Managing Editor Malli Gupta BMC ’12, the paper received a notice from the SGA treasurer Laurel Lemon BMC ’11 ten days before the start of the semester saying that funding for Bi-Co had been cut. This issue of sharing funding was often discussed between the SC and SGA, but a solution was never reached in how to split funding.

“We had some response but it wasn’t enough,” SGA President Sophie Papavizas BMC ’12 said. “What we decided was that maybe it would come off as a little drastic but it would start the conversation.”
A staff editorial, published on the Bi-Co’s website yesterday, expressed extreme dissatisfaction with this though.

“While we agree that the funding of bi-co clubs needed to be reevaluated, we believe that using the student newspaper as a means to achieve that end is completely unacceptable,” the editorial said, also calling the handling of the funding “reckless” since the Bi-Co at no point before this semester was aware it would be caught up in the middle of this debate.

With no money from Bryn Mawr, the Bi-Co then submitted a budget to Haverford, which does its budgeting on a semesterly basis.

The Bi-Co had asked for $14,112, but SC budgeted them for $3,500 for the first half of the semester and at mid-semester would consider giving them more.

According to Papavizas, SGA knew the Bi-Co could ask Haverford for money, well aware that most likely SC would not be able to make up the entire cost.

The hope was that SC and SGA would meet early in the semester to resolve the issue of funding between the two schools; an unintended result was that the discussions did not happen soon enough that funding could be restored to Bi-Co before their accounts ran dry.

On Tuesday the groups finally held a joint meeting to discuss the issue. “Quite apparently it needed to be discussed,” SC Co-President Ryan Fackler HC ’11 said. “We haven’t reached a final solution but both student governments are on the same page with a working solution. At this point we just need to type it up, distribute it, sign off on it. We left the meeting with something everyone is going to be happy with it.”

Fackler said that they are working as fast as they can to resolve the issue with Bi-Co.

According to Papavizas, the two groups will hold a regular budgeting meeting with Bi-Co on Sunday to decide together how to split funding for the newspaper.

Since the $3,500 from Haverford has already been mostly used up on the first two issues, the pertinent issue for Bi-Co is both how much more Haverford can additionally give and how much Bryn Mawr will be able to scrape from its already-appropriated budget.

But the problem goes beyond policy too — Papavizas said this will also hopefully resolve some long-standing issues with Bi-Co’s budget.

“We feel like the Bi-College News hasn’t had an incentive to closely look at their budget since they always get what they ask for,” she said. “If there’s a way they can do what they do each semester for less, that’s going to help.”

SGA wants Bi-Co to scrutinize its budget more, like most other student groups are required to do. SGA and SC will be working with them on doing this on Sunday.

Again, the editorial refuted these claims, saying that “in January the Bi-Co News received an email from the co-treasurers indicating that we had provided sufficient information regarding our finances and they asked no further questions about our budget. According to this email, there was simply not enough money for SC to shoulder the unexpected burden of the Bi-Co News. This inconsistency in SC’s story about their reasoning regarding our funding worries us.”

Co-treasurer of SC Kayla Hoskinson HC ’11 talked of the same issues. Bi-Co had originally asked for $14,000 this semester, without much explanation. When asked to further explain where the money goes with an updated budget, Bi-Co was already able to reduce its costs down to $13,000.

As the issue is being resolved, Bi-Co will continue not to print.

“It’s just unfortunate the way things came to pass,” Gupta said. “To a certain extent it’s understandable why Bryn Mawr wanted to cut funding since they didn’t want the burden of the whole newspaper, but the timing was really wrong.”

While some money will certainly come in, no one is exactly sure how much that will be. In the editorial the Bi-Co says that it is “still unable to determine its printing plan for the rest of the semester.” That will be at least until Sunday’s meeting, where funding will be decided.

When they know how much money Bi-Co will receive, the staff can decide what the future of the paper will be — which includes options such as bi-weekly printing and online-only.

Until then, Bi-Co stories will only appear on its website.

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