SU allocates $124K in funds, accepts 8 proposals for inaugural ‘Trending Topics’ speaker series

| News Editor

Student Union Treasury allocated $124,000 for the revamped Speakers Series, now called Trending Topics, accepting proposals from eight different student groups in a seven-hour session Saturday.

Among the most expensive accepted funding proposals are artist and architect Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam War Memorial, Ezra Klein, editor-in-chief and founder of Vox, Reshma Saujani, lawyer and founder of Girls Who Code, and a panel consisting of J Mase III, Katrina Goodlett and Mya Taylor, three transgender people of color.

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SU also accepted proposals to bring violinist and mental health advocate Vijay Gupta, motivational speaker Josh Sundquist, software freedom activist Richard Stallman and St. Louis poet laureate Michael Castro as part of Trending Topics.

Candidates for Trending Topics speakers are proposed by student groups, but SU is ultimately responsible for booking the speakers and promoting the Trending Topics events. In previous years, student groups submitted speaker proposals in April, with funding allocated in the fall of the following academic year. The timeline was moved up this year, so student groups submitted appeals in February, and the session to allocate funding was held this Saturday.

In determining which speakers to bring, Treasury representatives weighed several factors, including the speakers’ price, the widespread appeal of speakers and the similarity of speakers to other proposals on the table.

“It’s a tricky balance,” junior and SU president Kenneth Sng said.

Junior Alex Rothbard, a Treasury representative, noted the importance of selecting speakers who represent the diverse range of topics and interests on campus.

“We want to get speakers that are going to appeal to the widest variety of students on campus,” Rothbard said. “We really want to look at that intersectionality to see what we can get out of those speakers.”

Sophomore and Treasury representative Max Thompson said that while it’s important for speakers to represent a broad range of ideas, price tags make this task difficult.

“I want to go for a diversity of ideas and speakers, and in doing that I think some of these price points are going to be hard to justify,” Thompson said.

Ultimately, Treasury chose speakers proposed by eight different student groups: Ability, Association for Computing Machinery, Chinese Student Association, People Like US, Spires, Studio: TESLA, Washington University Political Review and the Washington University Pops Orchestra.

In total, student groups presented $643,500 in speaker proposals to Treasury, requiring Treasury representatives to reject over $500,000 in proposals. The maximum budget for speakers was $125K, but Treasury allocated just shy of that, leaving $1,000 remaining in funds.

Sng also noted that more groups submitted speaker proposals for Trending Topics this year than in previous years, adding that some groups even removed their own proposals once they realized funding was unlikely. Many of these student groups’ speaker proposals reached $100,000 individually.

Treasury also voted on a ranked waitlist, which had not been part of Speaker Series, meaning that any speakers who cannot be secured will be replaced by the highest ranked affordable option on the list. Immigrant and doctor Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, President George W. Bush’s daughter and global health activist Barbara Pierce Bush and Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz are the top three speakers currently on the waitlist.

SU Speaker of the Treasury and sophomore Bill Feng believed the earlier timeline and waitlist will have a positive impact on the process of bringing speakers to the campus.

“We didn’t have that waitlist mechanism before, and if people canceled, the money just [came] right back to us—we really didn’t do anything about it,” Feng said. “Now, if we can’t book these people now—which is before the summer, where the contract will be locked with a cheaper cost, possibly—a lot of that will be eliminated.”

While SU representatives see benefits to the updated system, many student group presenters found it unclear how the programming process for Trending Topics differs from that of Speaker Series.

Sophomore and SU Vice President of Programming Richard Wu clarified that Student Union will be paying speakers and doing public relations for the events, with responsibility falling on student groups to program around speakers.

“SU is personally bringing in the speaker—we’re taking care of flights, we’re taking care of where they stay, we’re paying them to come,” Wu said. “Your job as a student group is to engage the student body and program around that so they can have a really welcome audience when they come here.”

Feng noted that the Trending Topics process may undergo changes before next year’s allocation.

“One thing that we do probably want to do in the future is hold an info session or do one-on-ones with student groups who have nominated speakers for Trending Topics,” Feng said. “Because we saw in this meeting there was a lot of confusion.”

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