The Heights Editorial Board is composed of a group of elected Heights editors. They are responsible for discussing and writing editorials, which represent the opinion of the newspaper. News editors do not contribute to editorials.
UGBC released its annual budget at last week’s Senate meeting. President Cami Kulbieda, LSEHD ’26, fielded questions from reporters and offered explanations to Senators in a meeting open to all Boston College students.
Reasonable minds can differ on whether UGBC spends its money well, but at least its transparency allows for debate. And that’s how it should be. After all, students partially foot UGBC’s bill through the $694 student activity fee automatically included in BC’s cost of attendance.
The same is true for another BC club whose goal is to serve students: Campus Activities Board (CAB). The difference is that CAB’s finances are largely a mystery to the students who help bankroll it. CAB should make its budget public.
“CAB’s budget has historically been kept confidential and accessible only to our leadership and the finance team,” CAB wrote in a statement to The Heights.
While that may work for CAB’s operations, it leaves students without visibility into how their money is spent.
Let’s be clear: CAB offers a plethora of events for students. They hosted 115 events this year, engaging 30,000 student attendees. Many of these are free of charge, and most sound pretty fun. On campus, they’re behind such events as FanFest, movie nights on the Quad, and the annual Christmas Tree Lighting. Off campus, they run outings to everything from ski mountains to Red Sox games to SoulCycle. If CAB’s job is to create fun for students, they do a good job.
The frequency and quality of these events also suggest that CAB has a significant sum of money to work with.
The reason we bring this up is that CAB charged students for Modstock for the first time since at least 2015—when CAB began coordinating the event—according to a search of our archives.
The $17.50 ticket price ($20, counting the $2.50 Robsham Box Office fee) for a big-name artist isn’t ridiculous. But the new price tag prompts questions about where the money goes when previous concerts featuring Swae Lee and Neon Trees were free.
“In order to [host The Chainsmokers], we had to charge ticket prices to help cover the increased production, artist, and security/staff fees,” CAB wrote.
That may be true, but without a public budget, students have no way of evaluating whether those costs justify the shift.
$0 to $20 is a big jump.
Further questions are prompted by the fact that the University of Florida and Cornell University are also getting a performance from The Chainsmokers, but for free. Seeing this at peer universities leads us to believe this deviation from precedent may not have been strictly necessary, but without access to CAB’s budget, students can’t evaluate that claim.
We’re not accusing CAB of wrongdoing here, just pointing out the questions that arise when its finances remain unknown.
Students pay hundreds of dollars yearly toward student activities, and while that’s not all distributed to CAB, an undisclosed amount is. If CAB is spending our money, we deserve to know how.
