Questions for Austin Smith
1. Could you give me an overview of SPAC and the recent developments from your point
of view?
The Student Programming Allocation Committee’s purpose is to determine how funds from
SPSF are distributed. These are the same monies that fund CEB events like Volapalooza, other
student programs from groups like WCC and BCPC, and most notably, are the funds that are
allocated to SEAT’s Sex Week. Since before I was a student at UT, Sex Week-- like the Pride
Center and Office for Diversity and Inclusion—has been under attack by the rather conservative
TN-General Assembly (TNGA).
Previous attempts to stop Sex Week resulted in the creation of the Opt 1 and Opt 2 choice that
every student in the UT System has on their MyUTK (or comparable management website). In
the Spring, many lawmakers berated the Fmr Chancellor about Sex Week. I attended dinner at
her house in April and she said that she receives calls from legislators on a weekly basis about
Sex Week. After her student-centered non-compliance with the state government on Sex Week,
Outsourcing, and other issues, Dr. Beverly Davenport was terminated.
Before the Chancellor’s termination, Dr. Carilli and Fmr SGA President Morgan Hartgrove made
a mockery of the SGA Senate by promoting the results of an informal, non-binding, straw-poll
regarding SPSF Reallocation as ‘Overwhelming Student Opinion.’ Additionally, the Senate was
not informed of the $ amount that was to be reallocated—which ended up being almost 1/5 of the
SPAC budget. This deceitful act resulted in a strong pushback from some of SGA’s closest
partners: student organizations. I attended an unrelated speaking engagement hosted by a
business fraternity where Chancellor Davenport was asked about the SPAC situation. She said
(and I am directly quoting with 95% confidence in my accuracy), “I told Vince [Carilli], ‘Vince,
you got yourself into this mess, and now you’re going to have to get yourself out of it.’”
On 7/17/2018 at 2:30PM, an Ad Hoc Meeting took place to further discuss SPSF. The meeting
was primarily lead by Dr. Vincent Carilli, Vice Chancellor for Student Life and Dr. Shea Kidd
Houze, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Life & Dean of Students.
2. What was talked about on Tuesday at the meeting?
The discussion was centered on 12 concerns that the administration continues to hear from what
it calls, “the University Community.” Throughout the conversation, however, the
administration’s lack of citing student concern made it quickly apparent that these are largely the
grievances of lawmakers and parents—most of which do not even have the legal ability, under
FERPA, to see our MyUTK Billing Statements without the consent of a, you guessed it, student.
The 12 concerns provided to meeting attendees are as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

The equitable distribution of [SPSF monies] among registered student organizations;
The excessive costs of select programs;
The calculated cost of attendance, per participant;
The use of SPSF funds for controversial speakers/events;
The “earmark” of SPSF funds for select student programming boards;

 6. CEB’s use of approximately 1/3 of its entire budget on Volapalooza;
7. The annual duplication of “similar” programming;
8. The interpretation of the criteria used to allocate SPSF funds;
9. The composition of the Student Programming Allocation Committee (SPAC);
10. The complicated nature of the SPAC process for applying for funds for student-organized
programming;
11. The cycle of the allocation process (fall & spring semesters); and,
12. Whether SPSF funds should be used at all to fund student-organized programming.
It is not my place to discuss each attendee’s opinion on the above concerns since they were
promised confidentiality by the Vice Chancellor. I will however, take a moment to remind the
greater student population that every student attendee was committed to the social, monetary,
and expressive liberation of their classmates at the University of Tennessee.
3. How did Carilli set up the meeting? Did he reach out via email/to what measures did
he say he would grant anonymity?
My involvement in the meeting was actually a fluke. In the hour preceding my resignation,
SGA President Ovi Kabir said that the invitees were hand-picked based on their involvement
in student organizations. I only ended up in the meeting because a close friend of mine
needed to be conference called into the meeting and I had the technology available to me to
easily set up this communication. I was disappointed to find out that I was not invited to the
meeting because, as Chief of Staff, my role includes helping the SGA President form
Administrative Committees which includes the student portion of SPAC. Earlier this
summer, I had spent several hours forming the 20+ committees, including SPAC. I was told
by the SGA President to hold off on finalizing SPAC because the administration planned to
scrap the current committee and restructure it.
Once the meeting started participants were verbally instructed by Dr. Carilli not to record the
conversations that were to take place and that doing so would be a disservice to the goals of
the meeting (paraphrased). He also asked that we keep the entirety of the conversation in the
room and not share it with anyone. One of my issues with this is that nearly every person in
the meeting was a student elected by their respective constituents to engage in conversations
about student issues. As a student representative, I have nothing to hide when it comes to
discussing the interests of my peers; though I cannot speak for my fellow student
representatives in the room, I do not believe that they do either.
4. Vice Chancellor Carilli said he believed the meeting was productive. Do you agree?
The meeting lasted, I believe, close to two hours. Several times, I found myself redirecting
the conversation back to focusing on students because Dr. Carilli would be going on some
tangent about how hard it is to explain to parents and lawmakers why we allow Sex Week
and other programming on campus. One of his main points is that there is a legal side to
SPSF and there is a practical side. At length, he explained how parents at Summer
Orientation sessions don’t care about the legal side when they ask him about Sex Week. They
only care about the fact that it goes against their family’s beliefs, morals, religion, etc. I think

 it’s important to remember that 1) The laws regarding free speech and expression were
created to protect things like Sex Week (and unfortunately the TWP as well). 2) Dr. Carilli is
the Vice Chancellor for student life, not parent or lawmaker life.
Going on through the meeting, we attempted to discuss long and short-term solutions for
SPAC. The short-term was focused on getting Fall funds distributed ASAP. I didn’t see much
progress made on this front. Almost a week later, funds have still not been distributed. The
Long-term focused on ways to remedy the 12 grievances Dr. Carilli provided for us. I’m
going to include a statement that I released earlier this week to cover the gaps here.
5. Why did you feel it was necessary to share about the meeting on Twitter Wednesday?
Since I joined SGA, the organization has had issues with communication as it relates to
transparency. The Presidents have been notorious for being involved in these high-level
conversations with without informing the rest of their own branch or the other two branches.
When I ran with ImagineUT in the spring, we promised, through and through, that we strived for
a bottom-up SGA rather than a top-down SGA which is favored by administrators. At speaking
engagements, I (running as a senator at the time) vouched for our Exec’s team integrity on the
topic of transparency. Unfortunately, after the May 15th email below was sent, transparency
disappeared. Communication between the President and Vice President was stellar but the
communication to the rest of the was the executive team poor. Responses and actions were slow.
I proposed the idea for the Pride Month Statement on June 1, was told it would be drafted within
the first week of the month, but it was not drafted until around 7pm on June 30th. We had fallen
back into the same patterns of the previous SGA Exec that we criticized. Transparency is a
chronic issue for SGA but being asked to keep a meeting about SPSF and SPAC a secret from
our other branches, student body, and friends was too much for me. For the sake of transparency,
I decided to form my twitter statement about the meeting.
6. What do you hope for SPAC moving forward? Also, what do you personally plan to do
regarding SPAC moving forward?
Now that I will no longer have a seat in the conversation surround SPAC, I’m unsure of my
future involvement with it. I am not in any SPAC-funded orgs nor do I regularly attend SPACfunded programs, but I know that it is important to many of my peers, so it has to be important to
me. Moving forward, I hope that the administration stands up to lawmakers on Sex Week. I am
deeply saddened by defeatist attitudes towards the subject because of our status as a state school,
especially when these come from our administrators. As I allude to in the end of one of the
attached statements, I hope that my peers feel comfortable challenging Dr. Carilli and standing
up for what they believe in. Our administration has been very donor, parent, lawmaker, mediafocuses in the past 3-4 years. I hope they will double-down on their commitment to student
satisfaction and success.
I believe that the best way to calm frustrations and find a solution to SPSF is transparency. We
need so many people at the table that we have to get a bigger table. I plan to do this by holding
SGA accountable, just as I aimed to do with my tweet. If transparency will not be given, the
student body will forcefully [but non-violently] take it. Civil rights leader and congressman, John
Lewis once said, “We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back

 together in the image of democracy.” Not to be too cliché but I think we can put this quotation in
the context of our student issues at UT by saying: We shall fragment the University of Tennessee
into 1000 pieces and put them back together in the image of shared, student-governance and
exemplary student experience.
7. Any other comments, please leave them!
Below are statements that’ve released on twitter. Feel free to scan through them and pull out
anything you want.
https://twitter.com/TheAustinSmith_/status/1019700882282373126
https://twitter.com/TheAustinSmith_/status/1020072155332177920
https://twitter.com/TheAustinSmith_/status/1020346088518311937
https://twitter.com/TheAustinSmith_/status/1020723790282743809