As candidates for Georgetown University Student Association (GUSA) post flyers and share Instagram stories to attract students’ votes, the details of their platforms and plans often get lost.
Indeed, as the GUSA election approaches, with students voting Nov. 5 to Nov. 7, the Editorial Board feels there has not been enough discussion of certain nuances within GUSA’s appropriation process, which deeply affects students — student media groups perhaps most of all.
In 2001, Georgetown’s student body established a semesterly Student Activities Fee, included in tuition, via referendum. Referendum organizers intended for the fee to partially fund student clubs, but also to partially form an endowment that would replace the fee within ten years. However, because of factors including the 2008 recession, the university’s fiscal discipline and unjustified optimism about the endowment’s growth, the Student Activities Fee, controlled by the GUSA Senate, remains the sole source of funding for clubs.
Each year, during a lengthy financial appropriations process governed by the senate’s Financial Appropriations Committee (FinApp), GUSA senators liaise with club advisory boards, which represent clubs based on their focus, to distribute the money from the Student Activities Fee. For the 2025 fiscal year, which covers the 2024-25 school year, FinApp distributed over $1.2 million to 11 advisory boards and organizations.
Collectively, these organizations typically request more money than can be allocated, meaning the committee must make cuts. FinApp made cuts to five of the eleven groups in fiscal year 2025, including a notable 6.8% decrease to the Media Board — which funds The Hoya, the Georgetown Voice and other media organizations — from its allocation in the 2024 fiscal year.
While this Media Board cut is not the most drastic of the collective cuts, this decrease — from its requested allocation of $116,996 to a final allocated sum of $79,250 — falls into a pattern of behavior. For the 2024 fiscal year, the Media Board requested $154,018 from FinApp and was awarded just $85,000 — just over 55% of their request.
Senators on FinApp — Senator George LeMieux (CAS ’25), in Media Board’s case — explain their reasoning for their group’s allocations in a report. LeMieux attributed the 6.76% decrease in part to his idea that physically printing newspapers at volume is wasteful and unnecessary. Still, he wrote that “this Committee has no intention of attacking free speech or the press on campus, only that funding be used transparently and not wasted.”
The Editorial Board is pleased with LeMieux’s commitment to his duty of stringent fiscal responsibility and communication. This process is opaque and its conclusions are difficult to remedy; while the Media Board was fortunate to communicate with a senator so willing to provide written reasoning for the cuts, many other boards were not so lucky.
However, the Board feels it necessary to express its disgust with his views on printed newspapers and lack of faith in The Hoya to adequately appropriate its resources.
In an interview with the new Vice Chair of FinApp, Tina Solki (MSB, SFS ’26), however, the Editorial Board initially found reason for hope. Solki, who also serves as design editor for the Voice, reiterated her support for publications’ continued printing.
“I’m familiar in my role as a design editor that half the reason people draw is to get their works in print. It’s an incredibly special experience. And I think that printing has incredible value,” Solki told The Hoya.
While Solki’s support for student media is comforting, it does not bring the Editorial Board long-term hope for stability in campus media that it strives for.
Although Solki’s position as a member of the Voice’s Board of Editors boosts our confidence that the Media Board will be cut less, or not at all, this dynamic highlights the volatility of the process and the unreasonable influence of individual senators. The fact that allocated funding has been so dependent on individual senators demonstrates a fundamental weakness in the appropriations process.
Indeed, with regard to journalistic organizations, this funding process presents a dramatic conflict of interest. Student journalists from The Hoya, the Voice and other publications regularly observe and report on GUSA with a critical eye; yet GUSA’s appropriations process leaves crucial funding decisions to the very student government members that student publications cover.
As a result, the Editorial Board strongly recommends that any media organization with potential to regularly report on GUSA should not be subjected to their funding process, and should instead be directly managed by university administrators with no ties whatsoever to student media. Even if the university behaves in a more critical manner with regard to funding waste, the Editorial Board trusts that the process will be conducted impartially and with sufficient room for appeals and transparency.
The university administration is largely divorced from the student politics and social momentum that define GUSA’s FinApp process; the Editorial Board has faith that it will not only better and more consistently prioritize the needs of campus media, but promote a higher degree of independence for those media outlets.
The Editorial Board urges the university to consider how best it can promote the freedom of the press that we take pride in as a community. Divorce those who govern from those who check their power; remove media appropriations from FinApp’s control.
The Hoya’s editorial board is composed of six students and is chaired by the opinion editor. Editorials reflect only the beliefs of a majority of the board and are not representative of The Hoya or any individual member of the board.