An amendment to the Union Constitution proposed by Charles River Senator Oliver Price ’20 would, if passed, allow certain members of secured clubs to become wage-eligible. The Constitution defines the Campus Activities Board as one such secured club. The others are WBRS 100.1 FM, BEMCo, Waltham Group, Brandeis Television, Archon Yearbook, Student Sexuality Information Service, the Justice, and the Brandeis Sustainability Fund. Of these clubs, however, only CAB’s Executive Board members are already receiving monetary compensation. 

In a Nov. 7 email to the Justice, CAB President Liana Porto ’20 wrote that as of the 2019-2020 school year, all members of CAB’s executive board are paid. Prior to this year, only the president and vice president were paid positions. 

Similar to Price’s proposed amendment, which is a work in progress and subject to change, paid CAB members receive their wages through A-Board and are not paid for every hour of their work. Price’s proposed amendment would include language in the Bylaws that would only allow four members of a secured club to be paid, but eight CAB members are currently paid, per Porto’s email. Porto said in her email that she did not know whether or how Price’s amendment would affect CAB members’ wages. 

According to Porto, “our funds are currently paid out through the budget of the Department of Student Activities,” and “CAB receives its budget from the Student Union Allocations Board.” In a Nov. 9 email to the Justice, Price explained that the Department of Student Activities pays CAB. He clarified that the Allocations Board distributes money to clubs from the Student Activities Fund, a pool of money equaling $2.4 million per year coming from Brandeis students’ tuition. “My understanding is that [the Department of] Student Activities uses some of this money to pay CAB with the permission of A-Board, but that A-Board does not really oversee this money transfer,” Price wrote.

Porto said that all executive board members of CAB are paid for time they input into Workday for office hours, during which they hold meetings and organize events. CAB chairs are paid for three hours per week, Porto said, and the president and vice president are paid for five. “The hours members of CAB are getting paid for in no way accurately reflect the amount they actually work,” she wrote in her email. “They typically work at least twice as many hours of what they get paid for on a weekly basis.”

Porto wrote in her email that she did not “have enough information to comment” on why CAB was the only secured club that paid some of its members. She added that she “recognize[s] that the Brandeis student body contributes a tremendous amount of time into their extracurricular involvements,” and that “monetary compensation for these sacrifices should be a standardized practice.”

Price wrote in his email to the Justice that the Department of Student Activities “pays CAB because they want to make sure that Springfest is student organized, but also that it gets done. They think that paying the president makes the position more accountable and therefore insures that the proper planning is done.”

According to the Union Constitution, CAB is eligible to receive a total funding benchmark of $225,000 through the Student Activities Fee. This is the highest benchmark of the secured clubs. The second-highest is Club Sports at $175,000, and the third-highest is WBRS 100.1 FM at $60,000.

Director of Student Activities Dennis Hicks declined to comment. 


—Editor’s Note: Justice Editor Emily Blumenthal and Staff Writer Joshua Aldwinckle-Povey are members of WBRS 100.1 FM.