Some students will inevitably wait until the last second to complete Dean’s Date assignments. After they submit at 5 p.m., they can always look forward to the customary Undergraduate Student Government celebrations, held immediately after the Dean’s Date deadline. But the budget for this semester's celebrations is $50,000 less than last semester.
Traditionally, Dean’s Date is the University deadline for most written assignments and signals the end of the semester’s reading period. This semester, it falls on Tuesday, May 15.
The spring 2018 Dean’s Date celebrations will take place at the same time and location they traditionally have: the courtyard of McCosh Hall at 5 p.m. The celebrations normally include food trucks, music, and gear giveaways.
According to USG Treasurer Alison Shim ’19, the USG budget for spring 2018 Dean’s Date celebrations is $7,000. This budget is significantly less than last semester's $57,000 that was passed for the fall 2017 Dean’s Date celebrations.
In December 2017, The Daily Princetonian reported on the dramatic $42,000 increase from the $15,000 fall 2016 semester budget to the fall 2017 semester for Dean’s Date. The budget in fall 2017 was unprecedentedly large because USG paid for pop DJ Gryffin to perform in Dillon Gymnasium from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. The budget increase was proposed by former Social Committee Chair Lavinia Liang ’18.
According to the petition funding breakdown, $3,000 of the total budget in the proposal was funded by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students’ Alcohol Initiative Committee, which provides additional funding to organizations and initiatives “that positively contribute to the quality of undergraduate social life at the University and provide alternatives to alcohol consumption.”
Former class senator Soraya Morales Nuñez ’18 originally abstained from voting on Lang's budget proposal because there was no precedent of having concerts on Dean's Date, and she didn't know whether DJ Gryffin would prove to be a success. But Nuñez ended up praising the outcome of the fall Dean’s Date celebrations after the fact.
“I think it’s a step in the right direction to brainstorm more ideas about how to provide non-alcohol-oriented alternatives to students,” Morales Nuñez said.
However, there will not be a concert for this semester’s Dean’s Date celebration.
This year, the USG Dean's Date budget is back down to $7,000 because USG is not paying for a concert. Social Chair Liam Glass ’19 also told the 'Prince' that spring Dean's Date celebration typically have less funding. He said this is because USG has more time to prepare for the fall celebrations over the summer.
Glass also said that because the position of Social Committee Chair begins in the spring and goes through the fall semester, the spring semester has less funding. He also said he himself began his work with the Social Committee well into the start of the spring semester, because he was appointed rather than elected.
“The fall semester is typically more full with Social Committee events whereas the spring term is focused primarily on Lawnparties,” Glass wrote in an email response. “As the increase in Projects Board funding for this spring also indicates, the spring is full of more student group events so it makes sense that Social Committee does more in the fall.”
Glass also pointed out that Lawnparties was a huge expenditure for USG this year.
“We requested additional funds for Lawnparties to get Vince Staples and invest more in production, which I’m very confident was the right decision given how big his show was on Sunday,” Glass said.
According to the published USG minutes and packet, the Social Committee had a total budget of $117,000 for the spring Lawnparties that took place on Sunday, May 6. By comparison, Lawnparties had a budget of $52,000 in fall 2017 and a budget of $73,000 in spring 2017. The headliners for those Lawnparties were Tinashe and Jeremih, respectively.
In the final USG Senate meeting of the year, Shim confirmed that the budget for spring Dean’s Date celebrations is set at $7,000. According to published USG budgets, the spring 2017 Dean’s Date budget was also $7,000, whereas the spring 2016 and spring 2015 Dean’s Date budgets were both $4,000.
Director of Communications Tori Gorton ’21 explained that although patterns may arise when comparing Dean’s Date and Lawnparties budgets, they are not necessarily dependent on one other.
“The budget for the Dean’s Date celebrations is completely separate from and independent of the Lawnparties budget,” Gorton said.
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