UA President Alice Hall ’26 clarifies “The UA Files” dormspam debate
Hall: “I want to make sure that we don’t fall into what the greater nation has fallen into; in terms of letting misinformation steer things too much”
On Feb. 21, Anthony Donegan ’28 sent a dormspam email titled “THE UA FILES,” which voiced concerns about the Undergraduate Association (UA)’s budget and incited student debates about the organization’s purpose, funding, and structure.
The initial email questioned budgeted line items, such as $6,300 for an admin-organized retreat. It also called out the UA’s large budget, which, according to financial records, is $332,767.40 for 2025–2026. $145,000 of this year’s budget comes from One Fund. According to a statement from Vice Chancellor for Student Life Suzy Nelson, the One Fund combines “several funding streams” to provide more funding to student organizations, and is allocated by the following groups: the Student Group Funding Council (SGFC), UA, Graduate Student Council (GSC), Student Events Board (SEB), and class councils. The other part of the allotted funds come from the UA’s reserves, which, according to the spreadsheet, is $400,000.
The dormspam thread also pointed out missing budgets and unclear reporting. The formatting of the UA’s annual budget report has been inconsistent, ranging from line-by-line in 2008 to sum totals from 2023–2024, with the 2024–2025 budget missing entirely. In a statement to The Tech, UA Treasurer George Obongo ’27 stated the 2024–2025 budget was not posted due to a “transition in internal budgeting processes and funding structures,” referring to the addition of the SGFC. For 2025–2026, the SGFC replaced the UA Financial Board. In previous years, the UA Financial Board funded clubs directly, which is why the organization was allocated $400,232 last year from the One Fund.
When it comes to preparing the budget, Nelson explained that the UA first prepares a budget with their advisors, then sends it to the Vice Chancellor for Student Life and Graduate and Undergraduate Education for review and approval.
Assistant Director of Residential Life/Area Direct Connor Perez was the former advisor to the UA. Now, Associate Dean and Director of Student Organizations, Leadership, and Engagement (SOLE) Paul Murphy and Assistant Director of SOLE Elaina Emery interface with the UA. However, UA President Alice Hall ’26 noted that neither of them support the UA as Perez did.
While students in the dormspam thread also questioned the purpose of the UA entirely, Nelson offered a different view. Citing the UA Constitution for MIT’s vision on how the UA should serve the community, Nelson believes the UA serves a “critical” role in improving education, providing services, expressing student perspectives, and fairly allocating resources.
The Tech interviewed Hall to get her insights into the recent discourse.
Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
The Tech: According to George, each UA administration inherits the organization from scratch. He also mentioned less continuity due to the UA losing its SOL direct administrative advisor. Is there a push to establish better continuity between administrations, since that is kind of what happened with the budget not being posted as well? And could you explain more about losing the SOLE advisor, if you know about that?
Hall: A huge thing that I’ve been thinking about all year is connecting administrations, because it is such a problem. We used to have a SOLE person who was continuous between years, but over the summer, they got another job, and because of budget cuts and the hiring freeze, SOLE and the Division of Student Life (DSL) weren’t able to hire a new person.
When we transition in May, there’s an outgoing officer team that’s still around. This year, we weren’t able to get most of those officers to connect with us at all. So number one, I’m learning my new job, but everyone on my team is also learning a new job without anyone helping them.
As far as the budget issue goes, I would say that was just a genuine mistake. We hired a webmaster, and then our student engagement officer quit. We really wanted to prioritize student engagement, so we put the webmaster in his role. We didn’t vet every page of the website, so we didn’t notice that we didn’t post those budgets.
There’s a lot happening in May; we have to hire the officer team, teach them everything, and create the budget in multiple meetings and get it approved. That’s how it just slips. I definitely intend to work with the new president to get the new officer team onboarded, especially because I had a lot of advisor help that won’t exist anymore.
TT: Would you prefer it so that each year’s president will work to onboard the officer team or were you hoping to make something more concrete, like an onboarding guide that’s passed on?
Hall: Something that we had to do ourselves was create clear roles and responsibilities for each officer. I definitely am going to add items, such as making the treasurer put the budget on the website, to these roles and responsibilities.
TT: There has been a lot of student discourse about how to allocate unused funds; in general, could you explain why there seems to be thousands of dollars unspent in each fiscal year? What do you have to say to students saying to invest that money into student organizations, UROPs, food security, etc.?
Hall: The actual allocated budget is over $300,000, but we got $145,000 of funding from the student life fee. Then, as part of the budgeting process, the UA Council approves us to take some of that from unused funds from the past years. I also want to clarify that, in my email, I said the officer team only spent $21,000. That wasn’t including almost $60,000 in travel grants and all the spending of our different committees, and also other allocations that happen throughout the year. Council throughout the year votes on giving money from reserves.
The most frustrating thing to me about this is that anytime a student has come up to us asking for help with club funding, we’ve done something to help make it happen. Directly-funded UROPs pull from $7.6 million; we get $145,000. That’s such a small change to the UROP budget.
I get it: I’ve had my funding rejected for UROPs too; I’ve had my club struggle with funding. I totally understand that sentiment, and it’s very frustrating, but we did also ensure that clubs got an extra $100,000 this year. Last year, the UA got $160,000. This year, we got a little bit less, and club funding increased significantly because we were talking with the people that were splitting up the student life fee and trying to make sure that club funding allocation happened.
The UA is getting the smallest cut of the student life fee. I just don’t think that money is going to make the difference that people think it would make.
It’s important to have student government. If we were to say we want to give all of our money to UROPs, and we don’t want to have the UA anymore, that’s not what would happen. Admin would start splitting up the student life fee differently. The student life fee goes to the Department of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation (DAPER), MIT Health, GSC, SEB, and SGFC. We can’t just decide that it’s going to one place long term. That’s why I think we should work with what we have, use the money that we’re getting, and build the community that we’re supposed to build with it.
TT: There is a thought the UA should become more of a “direct democracy” in that students can directly vote on budget items, student events, or discretionary fund spending, perhaps in a town hall at the start and end of every semester or emails or Zooms. What’s your opinion on that?
Hall: It’s a fantastic idea. I just don’t think anybody would use their right to vote as much as we think they would. You have representatives because that makes the process more efficient. If direct democracy is what the students want to have, though, I’m all for it. But we already have participatory budgeting, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do on a smaller scale. We put $50,000 out of the $300,000 that we get access to on the ballot. People voted, and we really tried to get votes this year, but not everybody was voting.
I ran for this position because I wanted people to start realizing the UA has a lot of power, and we should pay attention to that. I’m very grateful that people are doing that. I wish that this increase in attention was based on facts. If people want to vote, they should. The first step is to come to Council; Council is essentially a town hall. Anybody can come to Council and propose that we give $100,000 to the UROP fund. That is how we already operate. It’s just that people aren’t really taking advantage of it. I’m planning to publicize that more, just to make it clearer to students. But it does kind of exist already.
TT: The UA has its own opinion about what the budget should be spent on. How does administration opinion shape all the things that eventually end up on the budget? Do you often find that there’s a mismatch between what admin wants to do and what the UA wants to do?
Hall: I don’t think admin shapes that much of it; they just make sure that we’re not embezzling — the retreat is an admin-organized thing. Something that’s true is that we don’t question their decisions. If all the students told me that they didn’t want a retreat anymore, then I would argue.
Admin gives us the perspective of having seen what’s worked, what hasn’t, what’s cost more or less money, etc. The biggest input that they really have is when they allocate us that money. They decide within themselves, “we’re not funding X, Y and Z” when they only give us $145,000. But that doesn’t really matter, because Council decides how we can spend the $145,000 once we get it.
TT: A brief clarification, about $400,000 is included in the UA’s revenue because of the One Fund. Is that yearly revenue or in total?
Hall: We were allocated $400,000 last year from the One Fund. Because of the change in going from separate funding boards to having the SGFC, we got significantly less this year. If you take out how much they planned to give for club funding last year, then they had $160,000. That’s why I compare $160,000 to the $145,000 from last year. To further clarify, the reason that our reserves grew so much is because clubs very rarely spend all the money that was allocated to them. The UA also doesn’t spend all the money all the time, but we want to do that.
TT: There are some controversial lines in the budget, such as $5,000 for internal UA bonding. George mentioned how these estimates are based on previous budgets. My question is, does the UA intend to better explain (in the budget) the internal pieces contributing to this overall cost? Line-by-line reporting is a thought, but that may not be feasible.
Hall: If people said they want us to report line by line, then we would do it. The time constraints we’re under to finish the budget are a lot. I know I’m not going to embezzle, so when I’m trying to get the budget in, I’m not going to put the pressure on myself to explain other things in writing. We do have to explain a lot in all these budget meetings. So putting more in writing: if that’s what students want to see, I want to do it.
I want students to notice and feel the UA in a positive way, and putting all my time into super thoroughly explaining the budget when nobody even noticed that the budget wasn’t posted last year doesn’t feel like an effective use of my time. I love when we get follow up questions on the budget, but a lot of representatives honestly aren’t that active, and in the past, people didn’t seem to care.
TT: Do you guys post what you’ve actually spent at the end of the year?
Hall: I don’t know that we do, but we will this year. A week before the email came out, I sat down with George and had a serious conversation about how granular we’re going to be with our reporting this year because in years past, it was more of a summary. We have 12 cost objects in the UA for all the committees showing how much each committee spent in total. But this year, we sat down and we went through RFPs in order to get to those numbers for the officer team that you already have in the spending. So we’re gonna try to be that specific, and we will post that.
The stuff we’ve spent the $21,000 on is a lot of events. For example, we couldn’t do that party in Barker Library because Sally Kornbluth had to approve it — and that idea came out of student input. We still want to have parties, but we want to make sure the line items are clear. We’re not just going to take $2,500 from a party in Barker and put it into something else. So then we had the UA discretionary fund go towards the Super Bowl party, Halloween costume contest, Family Feud, things like that.
I didn’t mean to say that we have never spent from the student life fee. What I meant to say is that no personal spending has ever come from the student life fee. By that, I was talking about the Bush Fund. Formerly, the Bush Fund had no maximum spending, so presidents would use it like crazy. Now there’s a $5,000 cap. Anything bought from the Bush Fund doesn’t affect students at all. It’s not coming from the student life fee at all; it’s coming from a completely separate, direct fund that wants to support presidents personally.
That’s where the Gucci suits that were purchased a couple years back came from, and that’s where people talk a lot about investment. And I agree, I don’t think a Gucci suit is a responsible purchase. Obviously, I haven’t bought a Gucci suit. There’s now a cap; you can’t spend more than $600 on clothing.
I really hope we can clarify everything. Overall, I want to make sure that we don’t fall into what the greater nation has fallen into, in terms of letting misinformation steer things too much. We do have power as undergraduates, and I don’t want us to squander it. The budget and the money is great, but we’re also in monthly meetings with the chancellor team, with the DSL, etc. talking about a lot of things. It’s a big advocacy effort, having a student government together so that we can respond to things like the proposed federal compact. If we don’t have the UA, then we lose all of that important representation.