College Council met Tuesday night to informally discuss the potential reorganization of Student Government.
The meeting was intended to initiate conversations about what could change but no official proposals were made.
When the Council opened the floor to members for discussion, some raised concerns over proposing potential changes to the College Council’s bylaws without first identifying any problems with them.
“I feel like if there are inefficiencies in College Council, which I’m sure there are, the way to address that is to figure out what the problems are and find solutions, not change the structure and hope it sorts itself out,” second-year Veronica Myers said.
“A lot of the inefficiencies [in College Council] are because of a lack of understanding on the part of the student body,” Myers said. “The student body doesn’t really know what we do, and the administration doesn't really care what we do.”
Several improvements were proposed, including increasing the speed at which College Council makes its meeting minutes public.
“The minutes should be dumped to the website as soon as possible,” fourth-year Cosmo Albrecht said. “I was just seated on this body a month ago, and I was trying to look at some minutes from earlier this year, and they were not posted.”
According to the Council’s bylaws, the minutes are to be made available “in a timely fashion,” although it is not uncommon for weeks to pass before they are posted.
The Council also discussed ways in which it can engage more with the administration, including by promoting more open communication with the administration and by inviting administrators to Council meetings. It is difficult to communicate with the undergraduate body, in part, due to constraints put on College Council by the University, members argued.
“The Administration has gotten very tight-fisted about school e-mails,” said Elections and Rules Committee Chairman Max Freedman. “With regard to the newsletter, I think [the Council] can only use one or two a quarter. One of them was used for the Mental Health Day.”
By the end of the discussion, no concrete propositions to change the College Council were made, but multiple issues had been raised that members believe warrant further discussion.
