On Tuesday and Wednesday evening, Student Senate held their first monthly town hall in Dye Lecture Hall. Senators discussed student concerns over dorm access and the proposed changes to the policy on student protests and the student Bill of Rights, as well as addressed other questions students in attendance had.
The introduction of Senate town halls come amid a push to make the Senate more visible and accessible on campus, according to Student Body President Natalie Dufour.
“I think with our kind of overarching goals of visibility and accessibility, we want to really give students the space to express their concerns and to come and talk to us,” Dufour said. “We don’t want to be a scary student government who sits in a room and makes decisions. We want to be a student government that hears its constituents, students, and acts on those wishes to try to really improve the student’s argument. So that was our goal behind the town hall, to give students a space to meet [the] Senate [and] engage with us for any concerns so that moving forward we can make sure that our work is best reflective of student issues.”
The town hall took the form of question and answer sessions where students could voice their questions and concerns to six Senators. The Senators said that questions they could not answer would be forwarded to Associate Dean of Students Thom Julian. The town hall began at 7 p.m., and Senators were present at Dye Lecture Hall until 9 p.m. for students to drop in.
At the town hall, Student Senate talked about proposed changes to the Guidelines for Protests, Demonstrations, and Meetings Involving Speakers, Films, and Other Forms of Artistic Expression and the Student Bill of Rights. The changes to these policies, which were proposed by the College, will be voted on by General Faculty before they go into effect. General Faculty originally considered the changes to Protest Guidelines at their September meeting, but decided to delay the vote to allow for more consideration.
According to Dufour, Student Senate requested that the vote be delayed further from October to November to allow for student input. Student Senate has voting power on the General Faculty, with 16 votes between their members.
Senate has been active in reviewing the updates to both the Bill of Rights and protest guidelines. College third-year Juwayria Zahurullah, racial equity chair for the Senate, said she went through protest guides multiple times with Thom Julian and other senators. She said that the revisions are intended to provide clarification to a more than 20-year-old policy and to condense the policy so that students do not have to go through multiple documents to have a comprehensive understanding of them.
The language of the proposed updates was shared with the student body through the Senate Weekly email update, including recent changes made with faculty input. Zahurullah said that the faculty-suggested changes were primarily intended to make the language in the policies as clear as possible to students.
A student asked about a section pertaining to financial aid that was removed from the Bill of Rights. Dufour said it was cut because financial aid was not relevant in the document, not because the College’s policy on financial aid had been changed.
Zahurullah explained that in Section 8 of the Protest Guidelines, the multistep process for sanctioning free speech violations was removed to clarify that all students are subject to due process, as in any other disciplinary infraction case. She said that Section 3C, which previously stated that meetings of any group that used College funds should be designated and treated as open, was removed to make it clear organizations are allowed to have closed meetings.
Conservatory fourth-year Cendan Dillon, who serves as Conservatory representative, said he found the section in the protest guidelines that would limit noise deemed disruptive, alarming. He said that he heard noise from a protest while practicing in Finney Chapel, but it did not prevent the rehearsal from happening. He asked Julian if the students protesting could have been penalized in this instance, to which Julian said that while technically the students were violating the policy, the school doesn’t usually do anything in these situations, because their focus is on de-escalation.
One revision made after receiving input from faculty and Student Senate is a line stipulating that the policy will be interpreted by the Dean of Students, or the office designated by other College policies.
The proposal to limit tap access to residential buildings to only their residents, which was released in a survey on Sept. 27, was also a major topic of discussion. The survey garnered almost 900 responses, 86 percent of which responded negatively to the proposal, reflecting the widespread disapproval of this idea. Students at the town hall expressed concerns over the proposal to limit tap access, questioning plans for inclement weather if the limited tap access was approved and voicing worries that limited access would disrupt theme or identity based communities that operate in residence halls where some of their members do not live.
Dufour said that Assistant Vice President and Dean of Student Life Mark Zeno told her that it would be easy to have a list of people who would be given access to certain residence halls to access identity-based spaces or student organizations.
However, Dufour also said that Senate had officially voted not to adopt this proposal after hearing the negative feedback. She said she assumed Residence Life would be receptive to their concerns.
“Data overwhelmingly showed that students do not support limited tap access, and we as Student Senate will stand behind that in our recommendations to ResLife,” Zahurullah said.
While the tap access limitation proposal was overwhelmingly disapproved by students, Zahurullah noted that 14 percent of students did respond in favor of it. Out of nearly 1,000 reponses, this is still a significant number of people. She said she still wants those people to feel that their safety concerns are important. Even though the Student Senate has a limited voice in implementing policy, they will make sure that all students feel safe and heard.
College fourth-year Salem Holter, chair of the Sci-Fi Student Collective, came to town hall to share concerns that students’ access to Sci-Fi Hall might limit community building with students who weren’t residents of Noah Hall. They said they were pleased with how the Senate responded to their concerns.
“I think it definitely addressed a lot of my concerns,” Holter said. “I loved the fact they sent all the student orgs an email to come and participate if we had any concerns. It meant this is a space where I can bring it up. And it felt like it was definitely addressed. Overall, I’m very happy with the communication and conversation we had.”
Students also expressed concerns over the costs and limited hours at DeCafé and the lack of seating in the Rathskeller. This semester, Decafé began closing at 10:00 p.m. on weekends instead of 11:30 p.m. like before. There has been no seating in the Rathskeller for the past year. Dufour said concerns about the Rathskeller would be given to College third-year Housing and Dining Committee Chair Lluvia Munoz.
