WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH FINCOM?

LINC LUKE | STAFF WRITER

Committees are a big part of student life and community at Hendrix College, a great way to get involved especially in your underclassmen years. The word on everyone’s tongue right now, however, is the financial committee. The financial committee, or

FinCom as it’s so lovingly called, is a branch of the student senate and serves purpose in hearing out financial requests for students and activities. FinCom makes sure that money doesn’t stop students from getting to participate in opportunities that they may not have been able to otherwise financially.

The real news, however, is regarding the Media Committee’s struggle with FinCom. The Media Committee was in desperate need of new computers that aren’t 13 years old.

For context, there are 5 organizations that are in media committee, however only 4 really need the computers. The Profile, Troubadour, Aonian, and Hendrix Scientific. The computers they had before just weren’t going to cut it. They couldn’t run the necessary programs needed to design and create layouts for the publications. As the committee voted on whether to fund this budget, there was a bit of tension in the room and interrogative questioning before they voted to only fund one computer for the media organizations.

According to a member of FinCom, “it just seemed like they were asking the same question ‘do you really need the computers?’”. FinCom had previously just approved a 6-7,000-dollar budget for another organization and were hesitant about giving another hefty budget the approval.

FinCom’s behavior towards Media Committee was described by a member of Media Committee as stemming “from both miscommunication and (if I’m honest) childish behavior”.

In particular, A few members of FinCom sent memes back and forth to each other mocking the Media Committee and saying rather hurtful things about specific members of senate as well. In the end, however, after a lot of talking and a new budget proposal, the Media Committee got all three computers. Although FinCom is a part of the Senate, over the past few weeks there has been some tension about an event senate was throwing and the budget behind it. According to a FinCom member, they asked for a sum of money for food, but FinCom members agreed that it was too large of a budget and decided to shorten it a bit. However, FinCom members then tried to replan the event themselves while also debating Senate’s choices of T-shirts according to a member of FinCom. Then, of course, the situation with the memes directed at both the senate President and Media Committee. One party involved talked about feeling like it was personal and that there was an adjust of budget from FinCom for personal reason outside of Senate. However, after a conversation between FinCom and said Senator, they had it worked out that it was not personal, and it was just to do with the budget and spending. All has been resolved and on good terms.

It’s important to note that FinCom, in the past years, had a much larger budget due to the pandemic. Since there were no events or organizations to fund, their yearly budget stockpiled until they had a more than comfortable budget. Now that organizations are back to what they were previous to COVID, Senate is willing and able to fund events for the student body. This year, however, the budget returned to its yearly budget that gets reset every semester which makes FinCom want to be a bit more conservative with how they spend money. However, FinCom rarely denies budgets, more often adjusting budgets than anything.

The truth is that no one should be afraid to go to FinCom with their budget proposal. The recent tension with FinCom, Senate, and the Media Committee is being referred to as a ‘miscommunication.’ All parties have worked together to move past this issue. “I will say, since the situation between Media Committee and FinCom took place, I can definitely tell FinCom has taken the time to learn from this experience,” assured a member of the Media Committee. FinCom is not scary and should be a welcoming place where people should feel like they can talk things out and come to a reasonable agreement to offer opportunities to the students.

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