My name’s Peter and I’m the editor in chief of Kitsch Magazine. By the time you read this, the Student Assembly will have made up its mind to not give us any more funding for the rest of the year. What brought about this remarkable decision was not an egregious violation made by a particular individual, nor that we offended the S.A. in any particular way, but — at the risk of sounding peevish — that we were not given a fair trial.

Our story: Before the SAFC funding application was even due, one of our staff members accidentally forgot to submit a part of the online pre-application. Upon realizing her mistake, she contacted an SAFC co-chair a few days before the official due date. The co-chair informed her that there was nothing he could do, that because of this error Kitsch could not proceed with the application and would be ineligible for funding. Not wanting to believe it, I went to see SAFC accountant representative Terry Ector on Tuesday morning — she told me the same thing.

Then, thinking I’d found a loophole, I asked her about the grace period, wherein organizations could turn in applications a day late but nevertheless be accepted, albeit at the cost of having 25 percent of their funding deducted. Unfortunately, Ector told me, the SAFC doesn’t do this any longer.

“Rules are rules. There’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry.”

It makes no sense to me why the SAFC would decide to stop having a grace period. It’s as if cutting organizations a little bit of slack for being run by fallible people was such a deplorable thing to do that assembly members took the time to make sure it could never happen again.

The more I think about it, the less these policies and procedures — and the entire SAFC, for that matter — make sense to me.

Let’s take another example.

This past fall, the SAFC did the same thing to another organization with a far nobler purpose than Kitsch, the Cornell Organization for Labor Action. After failing to submit its application in on time, COLA appealed. The SAFC, charmingly, still voted to deny the organization funding, deciding that money that would have gone to a more than worthy cause — namely, economic justice — instead went to something like the Juggling Club, which proved its worthiness by submitting forms in on time.

“The Student Assembly,” its mission statement reads, “deals with quality of life issues for students, making sure that student issues are heard and addressed.” If the said issue is disorganization, then the SAFC does indeed do an astounding job addressing it, establishing a punitive system that makes Guantanamo Bay look like Aspen.

As for other “quality of life” issues, such as tolerance of the missteps of others, the SAFC couldn’t care less, often adding insult to injury with a bizarrely unforgiving paternalism. As if it were its personal duty to teach student organizations a lesson for being disorganized, the SAFC’s major misstep is its obsession with missteps and, more specifically, with punishing organizations committing them even after groups get their ducks in a row and try to make amends. This seems less like tough love to me and more like an insincere, cruel condescension.

Enough is enough. I’m sick of the SAFC’s hypocrisy and I’m calling its bluff. If the SAFC truly believed in “quality of life,” it would realize that a major characteristic of human beings, and a fundamental quality of human life — particularly that of sleep-deprived college students — is error. Therefore, instead of tacitly accepting the SAFC’s decision to not fund Kitsch, I want to loudly challenge it. Point blank: the SAFC does not support student groups as much as it supposes.

In fact, this support often runs second to a confusing hostility towards the student body. The rules and standards the SAFC follows are at best unreasonable, and at worst absurd and detrimental. The logic governing its blind obedience to guidelines is circular and self-consuming.

Think of the statement, “Rules are rules.” What does that even mean? When I need assistance, when I have made a minor misstep and need help, I don’t talk to a rule, I talk to a person.

Although it may seem to be ruled by some faceless, unreachable force, which can never be contacted (and certainly can never compromise), the SAFC is in reality ruled by people — people who are so caught up in upholding standards that they forget who the standards are supposed to serve.