This year, the student body has been inundated with e-mails and articles about the financial difficulties Brandeis has been having. Clubs are fighting over scraps in order to get what each considers to be the bare necessities. With too many clubs needing funding and not enough funding to go around, everyone has been scrambling for ideas to get around the budgetary pinch. Having rejected the plan to make it harder to be a club, I decided to look at the actual allocations figures to see who was asking for money, what they wanted the money for, and how much they received. I?ll admit that I was stunned when I saw some of the numbers. Some requests that seemed absolutely essential got passed over and some that seemed really frivolous were met in full. The requests that stunned me the most, however, were the class of requests that I call the ?pay for my vacation? requests. I have, in my reasonably privileged life, taken a number of vacations. Yet, never in my life, has anyone paid my family to go on these trips. The A-board seems to think that paying for vacations is not a problem though. The Outdoor and Mountaineering Club received $7500 before appeals for the spring semester. This seemed like a lot of money, so I looked more carefully at what they needed. Some of the items I agreed were very important (first aid supplies, fuel, etc.), but then I saw $1600 dollars for a rafting trip, $1100 for an ice climbing trip, and $600 for a trip to an indoor rock gym. I don?t want to make it sound like I?m picking on the Outdoor and Mountaineering Club because they certainly were not the only club to get paid vacations, but I could hardly believe that the money I paid to go to Brandeis was being used to give someone else a trip. I believe that the Outdoor and Mountaineering Club has good reason to exist and I think they serve a valuable purpose, but if they want to go somewhere, I don?t see why they shouldn?t pay for it. Many other groups were denied funding to attend tournaments and symposiums, so why was money being given for this? I thought about it for a long time and decided that if this is where the money is, maybe I should get in on it. My friends and I would really like to go to Paris over spring break (total package somewhere in the vicinity of a few thousand dollars) and we?d all really appreciate if Brandeis pays for our vacation too. Not convinced? Don?t forget that it would also increase our knowledge of another culture (hooray for diversity!) and we could bring back (at the A-Board?s expense, of course) t-shirts in French. I think this campus needs a French Awareness week. We could even have a party with a French DJ (Daft Punk is from France and they?d probably only cost a few thousand), French food (Aramark might be able to help with this one by providing French toast, French fries, and French?s mustard), and even a French kissing contest. Merci beaucoup A-board