The Board of Regents passed a policy restricting the use of student activities fees for purchasing food for student events, but reactions from organizations remain mixed about the new policy.

Before holding an event, the new policy requires all student organizations to fill out a form to specify the organization that will be participating, how many people will attend, the total food cost and the reason for having the event. The policy also requires the organizations to provide a list of names of the people who will be attending the event and eating the food.

“We were told by our Student Advisory Council representative that the Board of Regents instituted this act because of their perception that we used the money to party, which cannot be further from the truth,” said Betty Jones, faculty adviser for the Public Relations Student Society of America. “We would have liked the opportunity to defend our use of the money that is, in fact, students’ money.”

Janice Hume, the adviser for Magazine Club, said it was nice to be able to provide volunteer speakers with food after they come from work to share their knowledge and expertise.

Many of the events are also held in the early evening when the participants are hungry, and refreshments help facilitate networking and learning.

According to the new policy, University staff – which includes student employees and work-study students – may not eat food provided at a student event they are attending even though they may be paying student activity fees.

“Tonight I bought deli sandwiches, cookies and chips on my own dime for [the Magazine Club's] meeting simply because I didn’t want some club members, such as work-study students, to be left out,” Hume said. “And, frankly, I don’t think it’s a good thing for my officers to have to grill club members about whether they are University employees or to have to keep track of who eats and who doesn’t.”

“It’s money from the students that should go to the students,” said Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, faculty adviser for the Grady Graduate Caucus.

But Marc LaMotte, the program adviser for the University Union, said he believes the money is going where it should be – to the students – even though he is not able to eat the food provided at Union events.

LaMotte said there was no big change in his routine or in that of the Union’s, other than the amount of paperwork there is to complete.

“I think people just wondered how our money was being spent, and when you’re running a University, that’s the bottom line,” LaMotte said.

He said many of the conditions of the new policy were in place before, but they are just being more closely watched now.

“I would say it probably helps in being more accountable for the money, which is weird because I feel as though we were very responsible anyway, but I think it helps other organizations,” LaMotte said.