by theMoMA » Sun Mar 11, 2018 5:14 pm
As the head editor of Nationals (and thus ACF's constitutional leader for the year), I want to talk about this issue a bit more in depth. There's no denying that we've had issues paying hosts in a timely manner under the current payment system. Some of that is because of late payments from teams, which is an unfortunate inevitability when dealing with university budget offices and college students who aren't always on top of things. Our own organizational flaws, such as putting the large job of securing payments from teams and sending them to hosts on the back of one person, have been a major contributing factor as well.
Our treasurers under the current system, Jerry and Gautam, have both done more to ensure the continued operation of ACF than essentially anyone. From speaking to Gautam, I know that he's fronted his own money to ensure that people have gotten paid despite late payments from teams. Without meaning to imply that our treasurer has always done a flawless job, I don't think we can attribute the flaws of ACF's payment system to our treasurer, when we have done a very poor job of putting the treasurer in a position to succeed. This is an organizational problem that can't and shouldn't be pinned on one individual.
ACF is a unique organization in the college quizbowl ecosystem, because ACF is an organization made up of current and former college quizbowlers producing tournaments in response to the community's needs. The major advantage of this organizational structure is that ACF Fall, Regionals, and Nationals are high-quality, low-cost tournaments produced to community standards, serving the important functions of providing low, regular, and high difficulty tournaments throughout the year, engaging new writers through packet submissions and bringing the very best into the world of editing, qualifying teams for Nationals, and deciding a national championship on circuit-style questions.
There are downsides to the ACF model as well. Our organizational continuity is not consistent. Our support and logistical personnel aren't well compensated or well supported organizationally. We depend on people with full-time jobs and other quizbowl commitments to carry out our crucial functions without much supervision, simply because we can't afford to have supervisors in place. We can and should make improvements to improve these conditions, but reform largely depends on heroic individual efforts, and quite frankly, most of the people who give their effort to ACF don't have time to be heroic. Even the process of figuring out possible reforms takes time and effort that our members rarely have.
I think Conor's post represents a wrongheaded way for teams to view ACF, and I mean that in this way. ACF is not a business, and hosts and teams are not ACF's customers. ACF is an outgrowth of the circuit. It's a group of people, mostly graduates facing the real-world pressure of paying the bills, giving their time at well below market rates to ensure that the college quizbowl calendar has shape and substance. Because of that, I reject the idea that hosts "make [ACF's] existence possible" as woefully incomplete; it completely ignores that ACF, through the sacrifices of its members, makes the existence of the college quizbowl calendar possible.
I'll reiterate that ACF's current payment system is flawed, and that hosts have a right to be frustrated. But with that frustration should come the recognition that we're all a part of the circuit and the community, and with that comes some sacrifices. We will never stiff someone who's owed payment, and we'll try our best to make the system work better for everyone, but hosts might have to wait on payment longer than they'd like (whether it's for teams to pay or for the treasurer to have time to dig out from under a pile of invoices). I hope that teams in the position to host ACF tournaments take into consideration more than just how many months it will take for the check to arrive, because hosting is, at the end of the day, the responsibility of the best-organized teams to the rest of the circuit.
To conclude, let me talk about the major challenge that ACF faces as we move into the next few competition years. Most of our core editors and administrative personnel have graduated. I've seen enough new and talented editors to be reasonably confident that tournaments will continue to be produced up to standards, but the aging out of people on the administrative side is a major problem. To be clear, these are not glamorous positions, and unfortunately, the only real potential to be recognized in them is when you make someone mad. But without new people willing to serve in positions such as website administrator, treasurer, or meeting chair, ACF will suffer. At the end of the day, it's not sustainable or fair for current players to depend on the sacrifices of graduates to keep the game afloat, so I call on current players to make their impact on ACF.
Andrew Hart
Minnesota alum