If you “give a fuck”, you should go: Wesleyan’s Affordability Forum, Tuesday evening.

If you’ve kept abreast of (student reactions to) recent happenings in Wesleyan administration – the planned closing of the Art Library, the course load increase for visiting faculty, rising tuition, and beyond – you may be wondering if any kind of follow-up with the wider community is underway. Turns out the WSA has been working to organize a formal venue for a discussion about Wesleyan’s current and impending financial issues, coming out of ongoing discussions with administrators, work by campus activists, and [third thing]. Here’s the email you should have gotten from Evan Weber ’13:

Concerned about rising tuition and the affordability of Wesleyan? Have suggestions concerning Wesleyan’s financial aid? Interested in expressing your budget priorities (i.e. the things here that you’d like to see preserved and the things worth cutting)?

Come to an open meeting on the Future of Wesleyan’s Affordability.

President Roth, Vice President for Finance and Administration John Meerts, and Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Nancy Meislahn will attend, present their thoughts, and be available to answer questions.

The meeting will be held on Tuesday, April 24th at 7pm in Usdan 108.

If you have any related questions in advance of the meeting or would like to ensure that questions you ask have a response, please e-mail the WSA at wsa[at]wesleyan[dot]edu and we will forward questions to the administration.

Best,
Evan Weber
Chair, Finance and Facilities Committee

Still think that you might “care” about this “””issue””””? Awesome. There are a lot of perspectives on the general financial issue – I implore you all to read the Argus article I linked for some insight on the established view of budget priorities.

Also, this is Wesleyan’s Finance homepage. I haven’t looked at everything on here, but you may want to poke around – the current (2011-2012) Annual Budget Report and maybe the most recent Annual Financial Report will likely be summarized in some form, as John Meerts did in a presentation to the WSA two weeks ago.

A sprinkling of thoughts of my own: It’s absolutely not a myth that Wesleyan’s in a financial crunch (relative to what has typically been called its group of peer institutions, the NESCAC and the like). What is a myth is that all the options for how to weather the storm have been exhausted by top-level administrators – students, faculty, and staff that aren’t on six-digit payroll can and do have insights and solutions that are unconventional and effective. This meeting might be a great chance to get a foot in the door and take part in running institutions that are ostensibly for our (as well as society’s) benefit. And if it’s not, that can be taken into account in plotting a course for the future.

That last paragraph reads pretty terribly, so I think I’m cutting this post off about now. See y’all there.

Date: Tuesday, April 24 (TA-DAY)
Time: 7 PM
Place: Usdan 108
Cost: Somewhere around $60,000 – er, free?