Mayfest’s open letter, published last week, has raised concerns from the Northwestern community about the future of Dillo Day. But some aspects of the open letter weren’t so open. Allison Rauch has more.
NARRATOR: On April 4, 2023, The Daily Northwestern published an open letter from Mayfest Productions in the Opinion section. Mayfest is the student group that puts on Northwestern’s annual Dillo Day, the largest student run music festival in the country. Their message last Tuesday was serious – Dillo Day 2023 could be Northwestern’s last. The issue comes down to money.
In the letter, Mayfest describes what they call “unprecedented financial struggles,” explaining various pitfalls with reaching administration members for assistance with corporate sponsorships and an anonymous donation. They close the letter by stating,
Soundbite: “We urge the administration to find a solution that ensures a sufficient amount of continued and stable financing for Dillo Day and other events that are essential to the student experience at NU. A more attentive senior leadership is critical to fulfilling the needs of student organizations like ours and, thus, the larger NU community.”
Mayfest’s executive board signed the letter, including Darya Daneshmand, a senior studying journalism and neuroscience. She and junior Catherine Duncan, who studies journalism and international studies, serve as co-directors of promotions for Mayfest. They describe how the open letter came to be.
DANESHMAND: I would say it was in the drafts for a while. But we, it was very much a collective effort…. We just wanted to make sure that whatever we did put out was representative of…just how we all felt about the situation without really placing blame in situations where it wasn’t really wasn’t a goal to do so. And really more just like start a conversation around campus.
DUNCAN: I think like, we just wanted to be transparent on where we were in our process and what we were struggling with. And I think an open letter was sort of the best avenue to do that.
NARRATOR: Since its publication, support has poured in from the Northwestern community and beyond. Duncan describes the experience on Mayfest’s end.
DUNCAN: It has been really positive and the students and parents and people really have been showing their support which we appreciate so much and that’s been such nice feedback and just response for us to hear especially after putting in so much work throughout the year.
NARRATOR: Work that, this year, has been more complicated than usual. Duncan said that financial issues combined with a lack of administrative response has been quite the process for the organization to deal with.
DUNCAN: We did face financial cuts. And just some avenues that we tried to take to compensate for that weren’t necessarily open.
NARRATOR: The open letter somewhat breaks down the financial situation. Mayfest receives the core of their budget from the Associated Student Government’s Student Activities Finance Committee.
ASG publishes their past funding allocations dating back to Spring 2019 on their website. Last spring, Mayfest received a total of $354,440.00 from ASG. Taking the data available from Spring 2019 to Spring 2022, Mayfest receives an average of $344,078.00 from ASG each year.
Information on Spring 2023 funding allocations is not yet available online, nor was it mentioned in the open letter. Daneshmand went into more detail about the budgeting issues.
DANESHMAND: Partially what I’ve heard from previous exec and generally, my understanding is that the money is always tight. And so working within the budget means there’s, there’s really not–it’s always a lot of work to make the budget work for us. But there’s a line where it feels a lot less feasible versus we’re just doing our best to do a good job of budgeting.
In the open letter, Mayfest attributes issues with their Booking Committee’s operations to “lack of clarity with administration with regard to our budget.” Therefore, the unprecedented aspect this year seems to be the additional funding that Mayfest states they request from senior administration.
What exactly could this mean? According to Northwestern’s Student Organizations and Activities webpage, there exists something called a Senior Leader Fund. Student organizations can request a grant from the Office of the President, the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs, and/or the Office of the Provost. Each office has their own budget they can distribute, and typical grants range from $1,000 to $2,500. Northwestern’s SOA website does not list other grant options that deal specifically with senior administration, although it is important to note Mayfest does not explicitly state that they applied for this grant.
Aside from vague terminology, there are additional aspects of the open letter that are fairly opaque. For one, Mayfest states in the open letter that,
Soundbite: “This year, we received 13% of the funding from the senior administration that we received last year, but production costs have increased by 60%.”
NARRATION: Mayfest does not maintain publicly available information on their production costs and budgets, even for past Dillo Days. The only public information that gives some sort of a clue to Mayfest’s budget is ASG’s allotments, which obviously does not take into account senior administrative funding. Therefore, Mayfest’s statement about reduced lack of funding and increased production costs isn’t as transparent as it may seem. Mayfest has not made it clear whether their lack of disclosure is to prevent university pushback or for their own reasons.
NARRATION: These confusions aside, it is clear that the university has been largely unresponsive in regards to Mayfest’s budget concerns. At the time of airing, university spokesperson Jon Yates has not responded to multiple requests for comment on the open letter, as well as questions about the administration’s process for funding student organizations in general.
Because transparent information is not available through the university nor Mayfest, the Northwestern student body is largely in the dark about the future of a beloved campus tradition. With few details and explanations, all that’s left to do is wait and see.
For WNUR News, I’m Allison Rauch.
