In the article today on the Campus Women’s Center debacle, someone e-mailed me and threw their arms around about the following statement:

“Wustmann said a key point they hope to highlight in letters that will be sent to alumni, students and legislative officials is that just because CWC made a clerical paper mistake, the entire campus should not be forced to go without the valuable services the group provides.”

Now, “clerical” mistake must be interpreted. Perhaps clerical “paper” mistake was the wrong term to use in the story — clerical calculation would be a better way of putting it.?

But, admittedly, a better way of putting it would be “We had no real idea what we were doing.”

Here’s their original application. As you can see, when they break down how much time each coordinator spends on the group’s direct services, they’re INCREDIBLY vague. “Almost all” doesn’t really help outline time.

Then they tried to outline more specific numbers for the coordinators. Instead of saying one coordinator spent “almost all time” they submitted another document saying they spend ~1/2 their time on this or ~1/3 of their time on this. In the end, this broke down to a conception by CWC that their time total spent on direct services comprised ~61 percent of their total activities.

Well, SSFC didn’t feel that way. They looked at the numbers and did a few things: They discounted two events called Kids Night Out and Kids Time. Eventually, in the middle of their eligibility deliberations over the week, CWC gave SSFC another reinterpretation of their numbers, admitting that those two programs weren’t direct services. By their own calculations, CWC’s direct services time comprised 50 percent of their?total time spent on CWC activities.

The problem is that SSFC requires 51 percent. So CWC submitted numbers to SSFC that proved they were not eligible. What’s more, some SSFC members, including Sec. Matt Manes and Carl Fergus, calculated the numbers themselves and came up with much less. On the voting forms, Fergus states that he believes only 30 percent of their service time is direct service time and Manes believes it is between 40-45 percent of their service time. There’s some specific reasons for this that I’ll go into in another post.

What’s more, the person tasked with putting together this proposal (whose name is on the SSFC eligibility application, anyway) is Zorian Lasowsky. Zorian was on SSFC. He knew these criteria, he knew the rules. And he still couldn’t make the argument.?

So, is it a clerical error. Sure. A massive, repeated clerical error.

Edit: Speaking of errors, Zorian’s name was spelled wrong. My apologies.