The Oberlin Student Senate is in the process of updating its bylaws for the first time since 2021, seeking to emphasize clarity, financial accountability, transparency, and student representation while refining its organizational framework.
Senate President and College fourth-year Natalie Dufour has been hoping to update the bylaws since the beginning of the fall semester, when she first noticed some inconsistencies and procedural items that needed to be clarified or were no longer relevant to the current governing body.
“Some of the main additions that we wanted to make were the addition of our Health, Safety, and Wellness Liaison that has been an honorary position on Senate for the past two years,” Dufour said. “Also, there were inconsistencies with the Student Finance Committee Charter, particularly concerning the Vice President of Student Finance and the SFC Liaison.”
In the current, unedited version of the bylaws, the Vice President of Student Finance has to be a co-chair of SFC. However, the SFC changed its bylaws to remove this passage, creating a dissimilarity between Senate and SFC bylaws, which work closely together. According to Dufour, the current vice president of Student Finance in the Senate, College third-year Lily Gonzalez, is not a co-chair of SFC.
“We want to make sure that our practices match the bylaws,” College fourth-year and Final Year Representative Maya Hannen said. “We want to be following the rules that the student body has voted on for us and to ensure that there are no accidental inconsistencies throughout.”
On Tuesday, the Student Senate held two listening sessions for students to express their opinions about the proposed changes. Hannen joined Dufour to present and answer any questions, comments, or concerns.
Of the two people who showed up to either listening session, both had a plethora of hesitations with the proposed changes, so much so that Dufour and Hannen could only cover three of the 10 pages of the bylaws during the time they had before the students had to go to class.
“Students are coming if they care, if they want to know what this is about,” Dufour said. “I feel like we’ve done our due diligence to invite people, and at this point it’s on students if they want to be part of this process.”
College third-year Eli Ramer expressed his dissatisfaction with some of the proposed changes in an email written to the Review, including the new bylaw requiring Senate presidential candidates to have served on Senate for a year.
“If the convention has been that Presidents have served in Senate before, that is fine, but those candidates have been selected from open fields, demonstrating that they are who the Student Body wanted to pick, not who they were forced into picking from a narrowed or even unopposed field of candidates,” Ramer wrote.
Ramer cited other proposed changes as sources of contention, chiefly concerning Senate’s “subservient” relationship with SFC and the reduced requirements to pass future amendments.
“These Senate bylaw revisions [regarding SFC] are being framed as simply bringing the Senate documents into line with changes made by the SFC previously, but I do not believe this is sufficient to warrant the Senate giving into the whims of the SFC,” Ramer wrote. “Senate used to be involved in the selection of SFC members. The Senate used to appoint a Senator to be the co-chair of the SFC. This oversight of this appointed body by our own elected officials was crucial and should not be abandoned.”
For College first-year international student-athlete Suryansh Yadav, the bylaw concerning the requirements for president was his point of most contention. Yadav stated that the position of president should be based on ability, not seniority.
“ Basically, you have taken away the opportunity to be President from first- and second-years. So half of the [student] population is not part of it,” Yadav said. “I want all the people of the College to decide who their president is going to be. They should not be worried if they are [a] first-year, second-year, third-year, fourth-year.”
During the bylaws meeting, Representative Hannen explained the immense workload of Senate President even before the school year starts, emphasizing the importance of having a Senate President who has a deep understanding of Senate, the work that Senate does, the student body, and the campus culture.
Yadav explicitly expressed his interest and intention to run for Senate President. The aforementioned proposed change in the bylaws would bar him from running for President for the upcoming academic year.
“[Dufour’s] job was to be president and include everyone in this society to help them,” Yadav said. “Your job was never to exclude a certain number of people from any opportunity which is given by the College. This is what she is doing, excluding people. She has not done one thing in her tenure that made a real difference for students.”
Ramer, on the other hand, voiced his gratitude to Dufour for her attempts to increase transparency within Senate workings, the notes that were taken during the listening session, and for the listening session, but felt more could have been done to garner student interest.
Dufour will present to the Board of Trustees and distribute her two-page executive summary of Senate’s accomplishments during her term during the meeting March 7.
