LETTER: Money well spent

To the editor:

    You must be kidding me with the “Opinions split?” article about the BJ Novak show last week. Interesting title considering the opinions discussed were all the same. All I saw was a “Do it my way or we’ll make an example out of you” type of thing.

    From what I understand the biggest areas of complaint were 1) the amount spend, 2) the fact that the students had to pay, 3) the “private party,” and 4) the fact that not every student could attend.

    The amount spent: The money came from our student fees.  True. I noticed the article failed to mention that the unspent money doesn’t roll over to the next year’s budget, but gets put into a pool for other programs. Programs that most students won’t even know about.  What about those graduating this year? How do those student fees that they paid benefit them?  They don’t. If I’m required to pay student fees, spend my money while I’m here. Keep me entertained. Or give me my money back. Trust me; I can spend it somewhere else.

    $10 tickets: I’m sure if anyone knew the kind of hellfire they would get for charging, they would have made changes.  If they had brought Novak for the same amount, but kept it free, would we still be in this position? If the same amount was taken from the budget for the fail-safe indie band, would we be in this position?

    “Private party”: According to the article, 14 of the 21 invited to meet Novak were winners of a contest. The remaining 7 were friends and family of the event planners. How is this different than real life? Anyone who has the opportunity to meet someone famous got that opportunity because a friend of their cousin’s mother-in-law works for the step-brother of the guy in charge.   Life’s not fair.

    Attendance: Yeah? And?  Again, life isn’t fair. Next time we’ll just create a Facebook group and ask the entire student body what night works best for them.

    Conclusion: Can we just move on? It happened. Tom isn’t leaving his position and no one is voting him out. Novak was paid. Novak came. We laughed. He left. “The Office” is still on NBC at 8:00 every Thursday. I’ve still got finals in a few weeks.  I’m still not getting my student fees back. And neither are you.  Nothing has changed. I’m a student who paid just as much in student fees as those reading this letter, but was actually okay with how it was spent.

Sydnie Halverson