This year, students aiming to form an All-Square club will have a new club application process, requiring them to submit a sample event calendar and a petition with 100 signatures. All existing clubs will also be subject to a new audit this fall.
The Student Activities Board reviews all applications for All-Square clubs. The SAB decided to make these changes to the New Club Development program this summer.
Chair of SAB and CAS senior Mason Dettloff explained that these new requirements are added to the application used in previous years, which requires general information about the club — a club name, a mission statement, examples of the club’s uniqueness and a list of similar NYU clubs — and a list of four founding members of the new club.
With a hypothetical budget of $500, the sample event calendar must include three events for the fall semester and three events for the spring semester.
“The additions to the application were done to enhance the application process and to provide a higher quality pool of applicants to the NCD program,” Dettloff said.
The SAB began accepting applications on Sept. 11, and will not accept them after Oct. 8. The approval process takes a full academic year.
CAS sophomore Kelly Davis is the co-founder of the NYU chapter of the Harry Potter Alliance Club. She plans to apply to become an official club this fall.
“We … want to promote humanitarian efforts like fighting homelessness and promoting education in the city,” Davis said. “We want to be a kind of Dumbledore’s Army in the muggle world.”
In order to meet the petition requirements, Davis said she hopes to collect the newly required signatures at the first unofficial meeting on Sept. 19.
“One of the difficult things about not being an official club is not being able to find anywhere to host the meetings,” Davis said. “We can’t get space at Kimmel and a lot of the other buildings because of that.”
The new rules also include an audit of the over 300 existing clubs. The audits will be conducted by the SAB and begin in mid-October. The board will look at each club’s membership, constitution, events and activities in order to check the overall health of All-Square clubs.
“These are all things that fall within SAB’s jurisdiction but have not been closely examined for quite a few years,” Dettloff said.
Dettloff added that there are no current plans to make the audit yearly.
CAS senior Brian Kang, president of the NYU Chess Club, believes that the new requirements make sense, but said the petition may be asking for too much.
“One hundred seems like an insane number,” Kang said. Meanwhile, club officers approve of the new audit. “An audit, which is a reflection of a stronger commitment to transparency, shows that the school takes funding for the clubs seriously,” said Milton Koh, president of the Singapore Students’ Organization and Steinhardt senior. “Which, to me, means that it is committed to making and ensuring the entire system runs smooth.”
A version of this article appeared in the Tuesday, Sept. 17 print edition. Kaidia Pickels and Afeefa Tariq are contributing writers. Email them at [email protected].
