On Tuesday, Sept. 21, Treasury allocated an estimated $114,000 to bring Harry Belefonte, PostSecret founder Frank Warren and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to campus as Assembly Series speakers.

These speakers will join the four speakers funded last week—Hamid Dabashi, Dan Senor, Ernest Adams and Nicholas Kristof—bringing the total cost of the eight speakers to approximately $144,000.

Two of the speakers—Belefonte and Kristof—will speak in October. Belefonte, a famous pop singer and activist, is coming as part of Black Arts and Sciences Festival, and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Kristof will be coming in partnership with the George Warren Brown School of Social Work and the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

The allocations for the Assembly Series speakers were separated over two Treasury meetings, with the more expensive set of speakers heard last night.

At the beginning of the meeting, Student Union president Morgan DeBaun and SU vice president of finance Eliot Walker presented before Treasury, offering to contribute $20,000 if Treasury decided to allocate funds toward a speaker that cost more than $100,000. Bill Maher was the only speaker of the four that cost more than $100,000. His speech was not approved by Treasury.

DeBaun and Walker said they had campaigned on a platform of bringing big speakers to campus and wanted to fulfill that campaign promise. The $20,000 was carried over from last year.

“There isn’t a lot of precedent of subsidizing a speaker. Our administration campaigned on big speakers, and we worked really hard over the summer to get applicants for the Assembly Series,” DeBaun said. “We took a risk.”

While all Treasurers agreed that every speaker was interesting and would draw a wide and diverse crowd, Maher became the most contentious speaker. Many Treasurers were opposed to allocating $127,000 to bring Bill Maher to campus because the price included, among other things, $15,000 for Maher to fly in his own private jet.

Jasmine Berg was one member of Treasury who had reservations.

“Bill Maher is a great speaker, but I don’t think I could have sacrificed all the other groups for one event. I had reservations about spending $15,000 from the student activities fee on a private jet, and I don’t think I can justify that to the other student groups,” Berg said. “There are pros and cons to weigh, but it was 40 percent of the appeals account that was going to disappear.”

President of the College Democrats Kat Berger said they had looked at other big-name speakers and Maher was inexpensive by comparison.

Many members of Treasury expressed being uncomfortable with the $20,000 subsidy, stating that they felt like the Student Union executives were trying to incentivize votes instead of discussing the speaker’s merits.

“I can totally understand their feelings of being caught off guard. If we had more time in discussion, we probably could have fleshed those feelings out,” DeBaun said.

During the voting process, members of Treasury devised eight packages composed of different combinations of the speakers. Through continuous rounds of voting, the packages were whittled down to four, and then two, before deciding to fund the package with Belefonte, Warren and Wales.

“I voted for the package that I felt engaged the campus the most. I’m really excited to see that we have events that engage people past a speaker speaking at people and [that] there’s a lot of groups collaborating to put on campaigns leading up to the speakers,” Berg said.

While DeBaun stood by her decision to subsidize Maher, she approved of the speakers that Treasury did fund.

“At the end of the day, we wanted Treasury to make the decision, and they did. And that’s OK. The packages they did fund are still great,” DeBaun said.