You didn\u2019t really expect to be able to use <\/em>all those Flex Dollars, did you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n To students, it was portrayed as a clerical error\u2014a minor technical mishap that resulted in each of us blessed with enough \u201cspecial little treat\u201d money to fill Herrington Lake with Mango Dragonfruit Refreshers. Yet you couldn\u2019t help but realise the patterns, could you? Tuition prices rising exponentially year by year, each dorm having its own \u201cspecial quirks\u201d that seem easily fixable but just linger on\u2026 things haven\u2019t been adding up in Centre\u2019s finances. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So what was the solution? Well, we\u2019re journalists, so we did what we do? Pry\u2026 kinda. Maybe \u201cdelivering what you <\/em>should know about your college\u201d is a better way of putting it. Either way, we checked the books, talked with helpful department heads, dug up IRS records, even \u201csat in\u201d unnoticed on some phone calls directed at very important figures. To put it frankly, we did our due diligence to figure out just what\u2019s going on behind the checkbooks in this institution we call home. And what did we find? Loads of surprises, all centered around one bombshell fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Money?<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is none. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The pockets and wells have run dry, and we mean former Aral Sea<\/em> dry. Everywhere we looked, balances amounted to zero, and the funds to provide for the basic amenities we often take for granted (and complain of when we lack) were nowhere to be found. Naturally, this raised a bit of concern amongst our team, and the prognosis was looking fairly grim. How was Centre to break it to the oblivious masses that we weren\u2019t \u201cdown the hole,\u201d but that nothing <\/em>perpetually was available? Even more confusingly, from everything we could find, the money was still rolling in from its consistent sources, yet was nowhere to be found as budgetary and financial reports came around. Private endowments appeared to be at all-time highs, tuition money was still flowing in unbarricaded, but when the time came to actually have money to spend, <\/em>we were looking into the most confusing black hole we\u2019d ever seen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the longest time, there seemed to be absolutely no answer. And not only to us\u2014no, everyone <\/em>was baffled by this, even those supposedly in charge of managing every red cent that came into the college\u2019s possession. Red cents that there were certainly millions upon millions of, yet cents that, somewhere along the pathway to proper allocation, mysteriously vanished\u2014leaving terrifying snake eyes for all. Even President Moreland himself had begun making panicked, frantic calls to the deans, administrative units, and financial departments of other SAA and Kentucky liberal arts colleges behind closed doors (that we may or may not have been sitting inconspicuously in front of) simply begging for answers or funds. \u201cBellarmine? Sewanee? Hendrix?… Yeah, it\u2019s Milton\u2026 Listen, we\u2019ve got some issues down here\u2026\u201d<\/em> each plea for help began, growing more and more desperate by the hour. Soon, word began to spread, and anxiety began to swell across all who knew. Intercepted emails showed professors, tenured and not, asking administration for a firm answer on if they knew where their next paycheck would come from. There was no undercutting this\u2014were Centre to finally be forced to come to terms with its complete and total lack of money, the lives of thousands would be catastrophically devastated on all fronts. The main question now was figuring out where it had all gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so we looked\u2014not to snoop, but because our education, our lives <\/em>depended on it. Folder by folder, file by file, we looked desperately to see if the millions had accidentally been rerouted by some mishap or act of god to an errant repository. Initially, this proved fruitless; it seemed every possible location for Centre\u2019s money to end up showed no funds having been directed there for some time, from as little as a few months to as much as over a year. Yet after too many long Red Bull-supported nights, the answer was found in nothing short of plain sight. What we stumbled across was the nexus of Centre\u2019s financial storage and allocation planning, composed (surprisingly) of just a handful of Google Folders for marketing, athletics, scholarship, and maintenance\/housekeeping\/salary payments. Ordinarily, all the money would have gone only here, yet it seemed a fifth folder had been recently added to the mix, siphoning a positively ungodly amount of money into its reach, and divesting from everything the school actually needed. I can\u2019t say much more than just this: take a look for yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact is, we\u2019ll never truly know who made this strange and mysterious folder. Perhaps it was a bored prankster in IT, maybe a hacking-savvy student just playing around, or possibly AI, taking its first step towards coming to end us all (you heard it and saw it here, folks). Either way, we immediately contacted the appropriate parties and had all the money poured into the folder reallocated back into its designated locations, sparing all of Centre from a fate no worse than, well, the very end of Centre. So if you\u2019re upset about your mysterious thousands in Flex Dollars vanishing, then sure\u2014blame us. Don\u2019t forget to give credit where credit is due, though, when your freshman year dorm gets an unexpected remodel in the very near future, or the AC in all <\/em>the buildings finally starts to work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n -Connor Parks, reporting for The Cento: April 2024-<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Connor Park \u201cBellarmine?….Yeah, it\u2019s Milton\u2026..Listen, we\u2019ve got some issues down here\u2026.\u201d You didn\u2019t really expect to be able to use all those Flex Dollars, did you? To students, it was portrayed as a clerical error\u2014a minor technical mishap that resulted in each of us blessed with enough \u201cspecial little treat\u201d money to fill Herrington […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5724,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-centonion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/lh7-us.googleusercontent.com\/VLkI4qz1CxY7uNeoUKstYiWa0xoJwug1u99rqZKGoEPvBTe4F65HgtskWPBjQcUe8fuDZKNna5AS0G6wG24uwe1NQNExZYq62Cv4T_QcxcqVy1huLRMR-o6gbIq9rsI0LmJaUc_LMu-EpXYEUVZds1Y\")