Feature
The guts and glory of Geer Week 18
Sports
Feature
Hoop Bears amp up offence to face Dinos 29
Grading the SU Executives 32
gateway January 25th, 2012
Issue No. 19
Volume 102
THE
TH E O F F IC IA L STUDE NT NE WS PA P E R AT TH E UN I V ER S I T Y OF A LBERTA
Student embezzled $27,000 from BSA April Hudson
staff reporter @april_hudson A student embezzled more than $27,000 from a faculty association at the University of Alberta, according to a statement released Monday to Faculty of Business students. In their statement, the Business Students’ Association (BSA) revealed that $27,745 was stolen from a BSA bank account over the course of the summer, a fact which the association became aware of in August 2011. When asked, the BSA said they could not comment on the investigation or the identity of the student, but BSA President Kimberley Menard said that the association is working with the Students’ Union to ensure that this does not happen to any other clubs in the future. “Our internal controls are pretty tight already,” Menard said. “We’re just making sure that if an error is made in the future, we’re able to catch it sooner.” The BSA statement said the student in question acted alone, although all transactions are supposed to require two authorized signatures. Menard was unable to elaborate on how the student was able to act on their own, although their statement indicated it was due to a bank error.
“Our internal controls are pretty tight already... we’re just making sure that if an error is made in the future, we’re able to catch it sooner.” kimberley menard
president, business students’ association
Students’ Union Vice-President (Academic) Emerson Csorba confirmed that the SU and the BSA have been working together with the Office of the Dean of Students to investigate the issue. “We’ve been doing a lot of investigating over the last few months, just in terms of looking at the financial procedures of the BSA,” Csorba said. “The BSA has been handling this well over the last few months, and we’ve been working with the Dean of Students to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again, and at the same time that something like this can’t happen to other faculty organizations.”
PLEASE SEE bsa PAGE 3
-$27,000 photo illustration: dan mckechnie and ross vincent
top opinion
Business students need to fight bad image Ryan Bromsgrove
opinion editor
The jokes are too easy. A business student embezzled almost $28,000 from the Business Students’ Association during their time there. Of course it was a business student, people will say — this is what business students do, after all. They need to get some early practice in during their degrees in order to properly prepare themselves for lives of lucrative white-collar
crime. The big bad corporations in the real world will be clambering over one another to slap this student on their payroll before they even graduate. But at times like these, when one person takes it upon themself to give in to dishonesty, it’s worth keeping things in perspective. One person, so far as we know, is guilty of the embezzlement. The entire executive will be viewed with a certain amount of suspicion, and they can be rightly criticized for waiting until January to reveal an incident that happened over the summer. And recalling the leaking of personal information of members two weeks ago points to a pattern of incompetency, sure. But we shouldn’t give in to the temptation of
pretending that this is typical business student behaviour. Unfortunately, a lot of people will. And unfair as it may seem, it’s going to be up to the honest business students to fight this perception. Nice as the idea might sound, the incident cannot be ignored and dismissed as merely a regrettable case of one bad apple making them all look bad, even though that’s exactly what it is. Instead, students should emphatically denounce anyone involved, and take back their reputation — a reputation already unfairly ridden with negative connotations and met with scorn from others on campus.
PLEASE SEE embezzlement PAGE 17
budget cuts
Budget cuts forces Arts to eliminate 10 faculty positions Alex Migdal
news editor @alexem Despite cutting three vacant faculty positions for a savings of $500,000, the Faculty of Arts is still planning to eliminate a total of 15 support staff positions. A $1.5 million deficit caused by a facultywide two per cent budget cut last April has left the faculty scrambling to find savings, leading
to an initiative termed the Administrative Process Review Project (AdPReP). Through AdPReP, the faculty has found another $1 million in savings by eliminating seven tenured faculty positions from professors who have accepted retirement packages, which will take effect July 1. Those savings will go towards the next faculty-wide two per cent budget cut that will eliminate another $1.5 million from the arts budget on April 1.
In addition, eight support staff have voluntarily left their jobs, leaving another seven support staff positions to cut before the end of February. Savings for next year’s budget cut will not be found by eliminating more non-academic and support staff, Dean of Arts Lesley Cormack said. “My hope is that next year’s cut, we can take with a combination of better management of
our endowments, being able to use them a little more creatively, fundraising, and the closing of those (faculty) positions,” Cormack said. In addition, the faculty will be offering a voluntary severance plan for both non-academic and academic staff, as well as a declaration of interest for those interested in reducing their full-time position to part-time.
PLEASE SEE adprep PAGE 5