March 21, 2010
SGA Minutes
7:10 – Sophie Papavizas ’11 calls the meeting to order.
Roll Call
Assembly Members Present: Simran Singh ’10, Shannon Ryan ’10, Liana Donahue ’12, Maddy Court ’13, Hope Wayman ’13, Caroline Heffernan ’10, Julia Fahl ’12, Malina Toza ’12, Adelyn Kishbaugh ’12, Claire Smith , Madeline Vellturo ’11, Taline Cox ’10, Jennifer Savage ’12, Blair Smith ’12, Zandra Martinez ’11, Jenny Nam ’12, Sophia Abboud ‘12, Antara Tulsyan ’12, Miranda Hansen Hunt ’11, Mae Carlson ’12, Isabel Donlon ’12, Alice Fischer ’13, Emily Tafaro ’12, Elle Works ’10, Meghan Mahoney ’10, Hildi Greenberg ’10, Rachel Brody ’11, Augusta Irele ’10, Sophie Balis-Harris ’10, Jill Settlemyer ’10, Eileen Downs ’10, Alexandra Ashley ’11, Annalee Garrity ’11, Kali Graham ’10, Julie O’Neil ’10, Reggie Kukola ’10, Marisa Franz ’10, Sara Jane Rodgers ’13, Colleen Haley ’11, Sarah Sherman ‘11
Absent Assembly Members: Sarah Kelley ’11, Ellen Butler ’13, Ashton Shaffer ’11, Saba Qadir ’13, Caitlin Evans ‘10
Community Members Present: Sarah Moser ’12, Sam Salazar ’11, Ellen Ginda ’10, Alex Gaudette ’12, Beth Wiseman ’13, Elizabeth Held ’12, Charles Hersh ‘12
Announcements
Zandra Martinez ’11 on behalf of Sarah Kelley ’11: Sorry that I can’t be there…we have TONS of positions available so PLEASE nominate everyone you know.
Nominations will open Monday the 22nd and will close Sunday the 28th.
Positions available are:
Res Co Head(s)
Curriculum Co Head(s)
Traditions Mistresses (class of 2012)
Class Presidents for 2011, 2012, and 2013
Off Campus Rep
Haverford Rep
OIA Rep
(1) Member at Large position (until end of school year)
Songmistresses for 2011, 2012, and 2013
Honor Board:
1 year Freshman (2013)
2 year Freshman (2013)
2 year Sophomore (2012)
1 year Junior (2011)
1 year Junior (2011)
**** special election – 1 year Junior 2011(replacement to fill out rest of Susie’s term 2 year position)
Any questions? contact skelley@bmc or elections@bmc.
Your Two Cents
Julia Fahl ’12: I wrote an article in the bi-co that I hope you read, it brought up some specific thoughts I had about representation and what our role in community is. Maybe we could take a few minutes to take about here. If you don’t feel comfortable talking about this in front of the group, please email the exec board or me. We haven’t made progress representing dorms, and students as a whole. Maybe make sheets to hand out or giving updates to the community a requirement. I know Liana brought this up last year.
Sophie: We can have 5 minutes for discussion on this.
Blair Smith ’12: I agree, but I think some of the concerns that you mentioned should be brought to the dorm president, as dorm president it’s their responsibility to bring those concerns forward to SGA.
Julia Fahl ’12: I think we should stress creating more structure in SGA to represent students. I don’t think we have a pulse on what the entire community is feeling. The lack of attendance at plenary shows that people don’t care enough about the issues that were presented.
Taline Cox ’10: I’m curious about what you think the role of dorm president should be. How is turning in sheets going to work, when would they be turned in?
Julia Fahl ’12: Each representative needs to be more responsible to who they arerepresenting. They need to impart info and get responses to create better weekly agendas.It’s important to talk about funding but funding is not something that affects everyone daily.
Emily R ’11: If we did want to change the structure, how would we do it? We’ve always said we need more involvement. What can we do to make this happen?
Julia Fahl ’12: I’m not sure what we should do. In my personal opinion, I don’t think SGA is doing enough to represent students’ opinions.
Sophie: Next week’s retreat will talk about this.
Julia Fahl ’12: Okay, but if others feel strongly about it, maybe we should talk about it now.
Shannon Ryan ’10: We’ve talked about this for a few years, but nobody brings their issues to SGA, they turn elsewhere to get their problems resolved. I think the retreat is good start, but we need to get past discussing change.
Julia Fahl ’12: If we make dorm presidents responsible for asking questions of residents, we can find discontent and bring it up at meetings.
Liana Donahue ’12: We need to hold ourselves accountable. I don’t want to still be talking about this my senior year. We should think of ways we can change this. Can we do some SGA homework to think about it?
Julia Fahl ’12: Can we put this to the agenda for next week?
Sophie: Yes, but hour and a half sometimes isn’t enough time, it will need more agenda time.
Liana Donahue ’12: Can we have a two hour meeting?
Shannon Ryan ’10: I think there are two issues, indvidual issues, and then meeting issues.We have power to express opinions instead of just getting information. What can we do as a group?
Adelyn Kishbaugh ’12: I agree with confusion of the dorm president’s role, as a sophomore I wanted to be helpful, but the dorm president role isn’t explained very well. If we can get together and talk about better serving dorms that would be helpful. This goes back to the memory project we’ve talked about, to pass on methods of communication to residents.
Julia Fahl ’12: I’m glad we got some time to talk. If you think this is redundant or important, come next week with some productive things to add to conversation. Thanks
Sophie: Can you promise to watch email this week? We’ll be sending around emails with questions to think about for the retreat. Anything else?
Shannon Ryan ’10: We were concerned with the previous election and the number of votes that weren’t counted. Was there a procedural issue? Why wasn’t this called a mis-election?
Hannah Curry-McDougald ’10: I didn’t count it as a mis-election, because it took me a while to figure out why a lot of responses were labeled as unanswered. If there are problems with electronic voting, the bylaws say to send your votes to me through email. I didn’t realize there was a problem with Blackboard until after I started getting emails. After I got first email submission, I edited the wording to make ballot clearer. I’ve talked about this to Sarah Kelley and made her aware of potential problems.
Shannon Ryan ’10: Do you know how many votes weren’t counted?
Hannah Curry-McDougald ’10: I haven’t looked or counted, but I can for next week’s meeting.
Shannon Ryan ’10: I know we have to move on, but I’m just curious about what happened.
Blair Smith ’12: A lot of people didn’t understand the new Blackboard voting process.
Julia Fahl ’12: I agree, we have lots of issues with filling positions, we should make it as easy to vote as possible.
Shannon Ryan ’10: I think if there was a mistake, we should be aware of that.
Blair Smtih ’12: There was also concern about writing in names, rather than multiple choice voting.
Hannah Curry-McDougald ’10: I couldn’t find the option to make it multiple choice and still have a place to include write-ins.
Blair Smith ’12: Can we go back to surveymonkey?
Hannah Curry-McDougald ’10: That’s up to Sarah, who isn’t here.
Sophie: So now we are going to hear about the Campus Climate Survey Results
Campus Climate Survey Presentation – Chris MacDonald-Dennis and Professor Raymond Albert
Chris MacDonald-Dennis: Good evening, I’m Assistant Dean and Director of Intercultural Affairs.
Raymond Albert: I’m a professor of Social Work and a member of the Diversity Leadership Group.
Chris MacDonald-Dennis: I’d like to give an overview about who we are. Bryn Mawr has been doing diversity work for a long time, but student issues often fell through in the old office. 6 years ago, President Vickers came up with team approach to deal with diversity issues on campus. I was brought in to deal with student issues. Raymond does mediation work. We meet with the President periodically, to talk about diversity on campus to create change.Unlike at other schools, we can create change. We wanted to know “What is it people are experiencing on campus?”. 3 years ago, we worked with Elena Bernal who came up with campus climate survey, which focused on 4 different dimensions of identity, class, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and sex/gender. We’re now ready to roll out some of the results. What we’ve been doing is sharing information with members of the community.Nithya and Lily were commissioned to come up with a play based on the survey results. Their play Restless is going to shown this Thursday. We hope to make recommendations from this information and you all. Focus groups after the play will help to find out how to make this community a better place.
Raymond Albert: There was a long gestation process, which was a good thing. During that time we talked to various constituencies to make sure everyone was represented. As Chris mentioned, we will move towards making the conversations frame preliminary recommendations for the trustees. Moving into fall 2010 more final kinds of recommendations of how to move forward from those ideas will be made. This will produce good things for the college. Questions?
Chris MacDonald-Dennis: The key feeling or question from this survey was to ask “Do you feel like you belong at Bryn Mawr?”
Raymond Albert: How many can say yes? Is it a strong sense of belonging or very strong?These are informative answers. I didn’t ask about those who didn’t agree, but having gotten some sense that you belong tells us something good, but it doesn’t give us enough. There are multi-dimensions to look at. For faculty, staff and students we wanted to look at the 4 dimensions, class, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and sex/gender. Even those are limited in their own way. If I asked you to respond from a certain dimension, answers would vary.That’s what we’ve tried to do with this survey. The play won’t be literal interpretation of the survey responses, but it will address feelings. In a brief way, we’ll give highlights of the survey. It might not be earth shattering. The 1st slide speaks to participation in survey, which had a fairly comprehensive response. Closer to 50% of the community responded.
Shannon Ryan ’10: Were juniors abroad included? The response rate seems skewed for the juniors.
Chris MacDonald-Dennis: I’m not sure, but maybe not. This is a good response rate, so we can generalize about the overall feeling.
Julie O’Neil ’10: Who are the “others” in the survey?
Chris MacDonald-Dennis: Those would be guest students.
Raymond Albert: The second slide shows identity responses. The most obvious are dealing with class at the top and ethnicity at the bottom. There is some degree of difference in social class. The bottom category are answers in relation to race and ethnicity. Part of the question is “is this good or bad news?” It’s not bad news. The responses are informative in terms of sexuality and gender, race and ethnicity. Here again on these identity characteristics, undergrad versus graduate students, social class index, race/ethinicy mimic overall feeling.
Chris MacDonald-Dennis: Another thing we did, is to ask about trans-identity, there were other categories aside from female and male. The number of responses was low, but we did ask.
Raymond Albert: The same average scores were broken down for faculty and staff. Some differences from earlier statistics stand true here. Social class is the biggest stand out. Part of the story is that as with general data, persists a sense of difference when it comes to class and ethnicity. I’ll briefly explain one slide. What the numbers indicate, there are a number of lower class respondents who disagree or agree. The more the bubbles are filled in are related to their degree of response. Where bars are totally filled, large number of individuals felt that way. If you just look at table here and look down columns, quite a bit of blue pertaining to staff. With respect to dimension of social class, there were lots of people feeling at odds or not feeling like a part of community. I’m going to flip past some slides that ask same questions along same likes. You can see the percentage of people who agree to questions underneath. A story begins to be told when you look at these general items.
Chris MacDonald-Dennis: So that’s a lot of numbers. The gist is that class is the number one reason people don’t feel they belong, especially amongst the staff. The next biggest issue= is class/ethnicity. I’m not surprised. When I interviewed here, every group of people I met, said class was biggest issue. There are other dimensions to tell you about, we will be working on other issues affecting the campus. Not to say they weren’t important, we wanted to focus on these 4 identity issues as a start. Questions? We wanted to present this so student body can process the information.
Sophie: I think we can take 2 to 3 questions. You can also email if you have more questions that we don’t get to.
Chris MacDonald-Dennis: Yes, and come to Restless, to talk about the issues. We really want you all to be involved.
Sophie: I’ll also email out the powerpoint so everyone can take a look at it.
Raymond Albert: There might be an article in the bi-co about the survey results as well.
Elizabeth Held ’12: It’s actually going to be a multi-part article, and the first part comes out this Tuesday.
Raymond Albert: Please be attentive to the play and the upcoming article. Stay involved around these conversations. We hope to do right by you. We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the responses, and the data doesn’t necessarily tell a bad story. We’re hoping you’ll be a partner to us.
Julia Fahl ’12: I was just wondering when you were coming up with this survey, will these questions of class be focused to where people feel they don’t belong?
Chris MacDonald-Dennis: We didn’t address that, but that’s what the focus groups can be used for.
Julia Fahl ’12: Just a quick follow up. I think that’s going to be important question to look at as assembly. I don’t know how we’ll do until we get results
Sophie: Thanks for coming. Now we’re going to move to talking about Plenary recaps so you know what’s going on with the resolutions that have been passed. We’re going to start with the Onecard resolution.
Plenary Resolution Follow Up
Onecard –
Alex Gaudette ’12: So as you might know, the co-resolution at Haverford didn’t pass because their Plenary failed, but the administration wants to make it work anyway. Dean Tidmarsh is in favor of putting forth resolution even though it didn’t pass. Hopefully everything will go to plan.
Simran Singh ’10: Do you know how long will it take to go into effect?
Alex Gaudette ’12: I don’t know. I have noticed that my card works to get me into the gym.
Beth Wiseman ’13: I know their gym opened for us since ours is closed for renovations. Will it still be open to us after ours reopens?
Alex Gaudette ’12: I can try to figure that out. Thank you.
Bouncer/Server –
Blair Smith ’12: Res-Co is looking for people to lead bouncer program now, we’re in contact with Mike Hill and Marybeth. We’re hoping to hold a meeting soon to start an exec board, andfill positions like president, treasurer, secretary, etc.
Jennifer Savage ’12: We hope to have the program started by end of classes this year so it will be ready to go next year.
Health Center Referendum –
Colleen Haley ’11: I wrote a letter to the President detailing what was said at plenary. It took a few weeks to get a response and then I was directed to talk to Dean Tidmarsh, and I’m going to meet with her this week. I’ve been jerked around, but probably not with malcontent.
Sophie: I brought up the referendum with the President in person, but it was awkward, and she didn’t really have a response. We talked about alcohol/party review board concerns with President’s Advisory Council and they seemed in favor of the referendum.
Julia Fahl ’12: I think it was interesting that because it was last resolution at Plenary, it still captured the passion of the students. It stinks that JMac gave you the runaround.
Colleen Haley ’11: Dean Tidmarsh wasn’t giving me a problem, it was more like a timing issue.
Sophie: There is also the idea of having a paid grad student on the weekend that we talked about during budget workshops. Instead of having a nurse on the weekends, people could go see the hired grad student rather than going straight to hospital if they feel sick.
Julia Fahl ’12: I think the referendum was an important step, but as an assembly we should work on a greater plan to present, that way it would have more force.
Sophie: The Exec board has considered hosting a town hall to talk about this with whole assembly. This way we can find out what the students want.
Julia Fahl ’12: When?
Sophie: Before the end of the year, we have a potential date in mind already.
Blair Smith ’12: Can we talk about this more, after hearing from Dean Tidmarsh?
Sophie: Yes
Ellen Ginda ’10: Do you think there will be a change by May Day?
Colleen Haley ’11: I hope so.
Julia Fahl ’12: I know you’re working hard as Traditions Mistress, is there a way we could get others to work on this?
Colleen Haley ’11: I think we should keep it to one name when dealing with the administration to make it easier. To get involved on the students part it would be a good idea.
Sophie: Please email Colleen or us if you want to get involved. Moving on. The ACS resolution passed and brought a tangible thing we’re going to do now.
ACS Fund Presentation
Sam Salazar ’11: Hi guys, we put up a new budget for next fall, this would be like out personal ACS fund.
Sarah Moser ’12: This shows what we’ve talked about
Sam Salazar ’11: We want to bring back Andrea and Andy Suzuki, a bigger name band and a smaller DJ event. This is a lower budget than this semester, but since we’re not working with special events it should make sense. Well be sending out surveys to ask about potential bands you want to see, and what other types of concerts you want to see,
Laurel Lemon ’11: How come you didn’t stick with suggested price of $15,000?
Sam Salazar ’11: We can go back down. I thought the suggestion was $20,000,and I always round up.
Sophie: $15,000 is our suggested budget.
Sam Salazar ’11: We think that hopefully with success of this year’s concerts, we can handle this large amount of money.
Blair Smith ’12: I think $15,000 for one event should be spread out.
Liana Donahue ’12: Going off Blair, I think having newer bands would be good for the campus.
Sarah Moser ’12: Bringing back Andrea would be a different type of event than when she was here last semester. The survey would take suggestions for other bands.
Emma Wisniewski-Barker ’11: Point of Information – Part of the resolution was to fund bigger bands, so the number may be shocking, but the reasoning for this resolution was to give ACS time to plan ahead.
Sophie: We should focus on the money
Sarah Sherman ’11: The money that they’re getting comes out of clubs’s budgets right?
Laurel Lemon ’11: Yes, but it also depends on clubs and special events for each semester. I don’t know what special events is going to look like next year.
Sophie: Are there questions about total?
Julia Fahl ’12: How much total did ACS spend this year?
Sam Salazar ’11: $32,000 total for both events. $4000 for last semester. It’s looking like these two upcoming concerts are going to go well.
Julia Fahl ’12: So community has responded well to spending a lot of money.
Sarah Moser ’12: The community probably wouldn’t get 2 events like this again.
Rachel Brody ’11: It seems like bigger names attract more people.
Sam Salazar ’11: We’ve already been contacted by people who want tickets from Haverford, Swarthmore and Penn.
Sarah Moser’12: Everyone can apply to do special events, so this is for bigger events that are specific to ACS.
Blair Smith ’12: Since this is coming from budget, there might be potential backlash from clubs who feel they are losing out on money.
Sophie: Can we motion to extend time to end of speaking order?
Sarah Moser ’12: Can we push the vote to next week? I feel like there is a need for more discussion.
Sophie: We can continue the speaking order, and keep $15,000 in mind while we bring about discussion.
Sam Salazar ’11: Can we think about $20,000 instead?
Sophie: Yes. Are people okay moving the vote to next week?
Julia Fahl ’12: Can we send out information about the budget for a better decision next week?
Elle Works ’10: Maybe I’m not remembering the resolution correctly, but in asking for ahead of time funding, are you cutting yourselves off from special events?
Sam Salazar ’11: This is going to be our entire budget.
Elle Works ’10: So there would be no asking for special events funding then? So there wouldn’t be concerns about taking funds from both clubs and special events?
Sarah Sherman ’11: Can we take some money from special funding to give ACS instead of taking from club budgets?
Sophie: We didn’t take that much from clubs this year because of increase in dues.
Simran Singh ’10: This for Laurel, is special events leftover money from budgets given to clubs?
Laurel Lemon ’11: No. Whatever is leftover from the end of the year, is given to the Fall special events fund.
Simran Singh ’10: It’s for our fun, so I don’t think $20,000 is a big deal. We have a lot of money.
Sam Salazar ’11: We’ll detail our budget more and plans for next year in the email.
Sophie: You have the week to think about it and we’ll vote next week. We’re running out of time, buto ver break the Exec Board attended a Seven Sisters Leadership Conference.
Seven Sisters Conference
Sophie: We brought back lots of ideas. It was a validating experience to see how our SGA works compared to the other Sisters, we don’t have time to share, but email us if you want to talk about it.
The most important part of the conference was that we’ve been chosen to host the next Seven Sisters Leadership Conference in November, which would be an event along with 125thAnniversary. This is going to be bring the only event that brings other students to the campus.We want it to have students meet other seven sisters and get ideas about improving SGA. If you have any ideas please email the Exec Board.
Old Business
New Business
8:30 – Meeting ended.