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10/6/19 Students’ Council minutes

Each week, Students’ Council releases meeting minutes to the Haverford community. The ideas represented in these minutes do not necessarily reflect verified facts, nor do they necessarily capture all of any speaker’s intended point. The original document released by Students’ Council can be found here.

Students’ Council Weekly Meeting

Sunday October 6, 2019

5:15-7:00pm

Minutes by Devi Namboodiri and Sydney Churchill

Meeting Minutes

Table of Contents

  1. Attendance
  2. Summary of Meeting Topics
  3. Campus Updates
  4. Officer Updates
  5. Break Food Options Discussion
  6. SC Librarian Discussion
  7. Presidential Updates

  1. Attendance
    1. Council Members
      1. Co-Presidents: Katie Lieferman & Mariana Ramirez
      2. Co-Vice Presidents: Noorie Chowdhury & Evan Moon
      3. Co-Treasurers: Dex Coen Gilbert & Eliza Koren
      4. Co-Secretaries: Devi Namboodiri & Sydney Churchill
      5. Officer of Multiculturalism: Brittany Robinson
      6. Officer of Academics: Lev Greenstein
      7. Officer of Arts: MacKenzie Somers
      8. Officer of Athletics: Rodrigo Zuniga
      9. Officer of Campus Life: Katie Chung
      10. Representative of International Students: Saket Sekhsaria
      11. First Year Rep: Rasaaq Shittu
      12. Sophomore Rep: Natalia Cordon
      13. Junior Rep: Brian Hu
      14. Senior Rep: Emily Lin
    2. Absent: Marked with Red
    3. Late: Marked with Orange

  1. Summary of Meeting Topics

This week, the Students’ Council meeting consisted of a discussion about things that are happening and relevant on campus on right now (3), giving officer updates regarding what we did last week (4), talking about break food options (5), discussing the position of SC librarian and how we should go about appointing them(6) and then getting presidential updates from Mariana and Katie (7).

  1. Campus Updates

MacKenzie: James house had our workday today. It was hard work but we now have a decently clean James’ house, exciting things are happening with that. 

Noorie: I saw the jumpsuit workshop was taking place in Lutnick, it seemed like it went well.

Emily: Did anyone go to the celebration?

Saket: Yea, it was good. Having it in Founders was interesting.

Noorie: Agreed, it would be difficult to have in Lunt because it would be sweaty and hot whereas founders was kind of too spacey.

Brian: The task force report came out.

Katie L.: Did anyone hear anything about it casually? There was a meme about it. 

Lev: Screwdate happened and the DC played jazz which was interesting.

Emily: Frisbee had an open house on Friday, it was really interesting and there was a huge turnout. 

Evan: Regarding the task force, it’s kind of going back, but I think that administration is basing their decisions about a lot of restructuring particularly with the Customs Task Force on this report. 

  1. Officer Updates

Katie L : Alright so does anyone want to start on officer updates?

Emily: I’ll start. Basically exactly what Evan said. I emailed Martha Denney who was on the Task Force for Customs last year. She did refer to the task force report when I was talking to her. I was also able to get in touch with JSAAP which is trying to work with different groups on the party host training. They want to have that meeting this week.

MacKenzie: Clean up planning and clean up meeting itself at James House. Had a meeting with Graham about Blast and ways that we can use equipment that hasn’t been used such as the equipment in 50s basement, Blackboc theater, James house, gameroom. There’s a lot of usable equipment in these spaces, that should possibly be transferred to different storage to make it easier for people to use. 

Rasaaq: I finished the Adobe First Year website thing. There are some tricks about how to effectively use it so I’m going to talk to IITS about how to make this better.  I’ve been working with Sergio Montano and trying to build a framework for the talk about consent and what the talk would look like for the teams we want to participate and how we could implement these talks and have training sessions for captains on the team. We had the idea of training leaders and captains on the team working to teach their own teammates about things. It is the same method that we were using for other teams and they said that this help. We are working on creating a GroupMe to reach out and discuss these issues. 

Katie L.: I have a quick question. Are the talks going to be informal (from personal experience, etc) or are they going to be more educational?

Rasaaq:  I think both. There was an educational part at the beginning for us, but the leaders of the teams also shared their own experiences and we would also go through scenarios and how you might act in certain scenarios. 

Mariana: What would be the way that the GroupMe would be being used?

Rasaaq: It has been established in Rugby for a while, and it’s a way of ensuring that team culture is changed from the interior rather than the exterior (by admin). It would make it a team priority, rather than an administrative involvement: it would regard team culture as opposed to administrative action, which can seem like forced behavior rather than trying to come from a place of more understanding. 

Mariana: With the Adobe outreach project, have you reached out to Katrina Glanzer?

Rasaaq: Not yet

Katie L.: I think this might be a good idea to because she could help you with this because she works on the First Year website and other materials. It might be helpful to make sure you aren’t doing work that is already being done.

Lev: Can I ask a question too? Do you have a way of checking traffic through the site?

Rasaaq: No, unfortunately I can’t look at how many people visit the site, but the Adobe interface helps the site look more appealing.

Saket: I don’t know how important this is but you can create a url on google that will give you statistics on your website. You can custom set sub-links for your website. We can talk more about this later if you want.

Rodrigo: A bit of updates on SAAC party planning. There’s a meeting with JSAAP regarding the whole party host training JSAAP is trying to incorporate this discussion during the training that Rasaaq is talking about. The meeting for the SAAC discussion does not have a set date, there was a miscommunication and the date is not October 6th. Lastly, I’ve been meeting with Julie Hans who is really interested in being a part of the committee and we are talking about alternatives to the committee such as an open forum and another idea is that it could be under the scope of the HaverHealth forum. We are trying to see if we could set up a joint meeting with Nicki and Kelly Wilcox sometime this week.

Mariana: To your last point, at our meeting with prez Raymond, she told us that Martha Denney is looking to create a task force on the athlete-non-athlete divide and it would be interesting to look at the relationship between these things. I’m not sure if this is what Julie has in mind, but I think it would be good to reach out to Dean Denney to see if there could be some kind of communication between the committee and her potential task force.

Sydney: I have an update from the task force meeting on thursday, basically we talked about how to go about getting student feedback on the report. No one has reached out to Mike since the report was released. We also talked about future steps for task force: centralized database for all jobs on campus– there is currently more low key hiring going on within departments that isn’t being made accessible to all students.

Katie L.: Weren’t you saying something about hiring practices?

Mariana: There was also a comment on making sure work study students get priority hiring

Sydney: Yea, both those are in the suggestions of the task force report. There is also currently a plan to audit to look at different departments’ budgets for paying students.

Devi: We also have been talking about how the minutes have been looking and in an effort to improve the minutes we’re trying to make them more personable and less to the point. That’s something that we are trying to do. We have a couple of things to talk about regarding the minutes. We appreciate that everyone is making an effort to slow down and we’re trying new strategies to make sure the points are getting across effectively. We want to ask that you make suggestions to the text if you feel that something didn’t represent what you said. That way we can improve in the future as opposed to just typing a new paragraph because that can change how it fits into the conversation. Thank you.

Lev: I finished an email correspondence with Ben from the OMA centered around the classroom climate report. I also connected me with President’s office, and have been talking to Franklyn Cantor to get in on conversations of their efforts on classroom climate. I am also trying to understand how I can participate in Leslie’s work related to people’s behavior speaking up in discussions in class. I also bumped into Loops and want to figure out how we can talk about EPC in order to get a better sense of EPC and what they do. I know Mike Elias said it would help to make that bridge. I reached out to Brittany to back up any kind of wellness efforts. I am also open to support other initiatives.

Natalia: What is EPC?

Saket: Educational Policy Committee

Natalia: I went to a SoHo meeting last Sunday and we started to discuss more events we wanted to do and the work they are doing in their respective offices. We are planning an event just for sophomores this upcoming Thursday. I am not sure where it is going to be located and we are using the truck that was supposed to come a few weeks ago. It will be this Thursday.  We are also planning a choosing your major event and want to recruit seniors from different majors to attend. We are trying to recruit seniors in different disciplines to come to this event. It’s going to about going up to people and asking questions as opposed to a formal presentation. I also wanted to talk about the party spaces discussion with regards to speaking with people I know. I talked to some of the people on my team and people involved with affinity groups. I received some very unexpected responses and people didn’t seem to have a problem with the way parties are currently going. I want to keep talking about that especially with my teammates, as this was surprising and not what I had expected.

Mariana: Can you speak more to the purpose of the Thursday event?

Natalia: We are trying to make use of the food truck because it was already coming but we want to engage the sophomore class too and we made stickers designed for class of 2022!!

Noorie: As and independent major, for the choose your major event, I think there hasn’t been a person doing an independent major at those events and so I think that would be super helpful.

Katie L.: What’s your major Noorie?

Noorie: Philosophy, Politics and Economics 

Mariana: Lev this could also be connected to your work.

Saket: In terms of major representation, it would be good to look at Bi-Co or TriCo majors, double majors or certain concentrators. In the past they really discouraged double majors so it would be nice to have some discussion about this because it can create issues if people are too discouraged.

Natalia: I agree with that sentiment.

Saket: Hopefully we can change the approach from don’t double major messages to a more open message, more supportive.

Natalia: That’s true.

Brian: So, I met with the Task Force, echoing what Sydney said about what went on in the meeting. I also met with the Study Abroad office because I was worried that juniors that are leaving for Study Abroad because of something negative on campus but it turns out this was not the case, they wanted new experiences. I’m over caffeinated right now. One of the main concerns was that the office was having trouble reaching out to the entire student body and trying to make sure that STEM majors know they can go abroad. They were talking about having an art exhibit with photos that students took while they were abroad. MacKenzie maybe we can talk about this and Lev also if you’re interested. It’s a way of encouraging people to go abroad. I just sent an email of updates to my class, also working on setting up office hours.

Dex: It’s become clear in the past two weeks that Fleet’s new management policy of not having personal vehicles being used is too hard for certain clubs, so we are working to address this. I am attempting to reach out to colleges who partner with septa to get discounts on tickets to possibly lower our transportation costs, but that may not work here due to our college size.

Eliza: Another issue we’ve been noticing is that people have been asking for retroactive funding and this can put us in a difficult position and it’s also hard cause often those people have already spent the money and it’s actually not something we can fund. I’m brainstorming ways that we can make this more clear and it’s an open question at this point but if anyone has suggestions about this let us know. Cause it sucks that we can’t give people money back that they’ve already spent.

Lev: Are you talking about when people have a budget created and they spend from that budget?

Eliza: I’m specifically talking about something that we haven’t approved. If they make a purchase that doesn’t match what it said it would be originally used for or if they spent $20 extra than we budgeted for.

Dex: There’s also been instances of people buying things that we didn’t budget for and then they email us how do we cover this?

MacKenzie: It seems hard when planning events. I needed three things from Mapes for an event this week, I bought them and I was just going to talk to you about how to get this covered. Is it possible to move money around? It seems like there are times where clubs are definitely spending excessively and then there are times where we need something extra at the last minute. Is there a way to deal with this?

Eliza: Yes, we have something called money reallocation and it’s in the procedures for the budgets. Basically, the money that you reallocated for unanticipated cost needs to come from somewhere in your existing budget.

Dex: Someone spent $1000, without having requested for it in the budget. Luckily that student is not out that money now but it is tough to work through.

Eliza: It’s not to say that we’re not flexible about last minute costs it’s just that people see that retrospective funding can happen and then this could be taken as precedent.

Dex: If anyone has thoughts or ideas, please let us know through email or fb message!

Katie C.: Some of my updates will bleed into the fall break stuff. As of Friday we’ve had 600 responses to the survey and it would be great to send out the survey again. Of the responses about half are staying on campus and half are not. In terms of some of the party host stuff, I heard that the end goal is that everyone will be trained including the incoming Freshman through a Custom’s video. I’m not sure how they’re going to incorporate the safe spaces aspect to that. We’re also in conversation about how to define party spaces because right now it is more about a social space and we want to try to restructure those definitions and include more things. What constitutes a party space? Apartment 10 isn’t James House, but things still happen there. My next update is something specific to ResLife, right now we have the liaison program and we are thinking about having them involved in spring semester clean-up because right now there is a lot of trash that needs to be removed at the end of the semester, so we want to get a check-in process for the IRLs. For this semester, it would be more focused on HCAs.

Katie L.: Are the student liaisons paid?

Katie C.: No, they are not but during finals week they may be paid and they may start getting some of the Custom’s team training too in the future

Saket: Points from this week, we had a meeting of the international students on campus ISC and IDOMO, we talked about two main things, one of them was distinguishing the two different groups because this can create confusion between the two groups. We talked about ways that the two groups can support each other and it will definitely be an ongoing process. We talked about collaboration opportunities, so groups can join forces. I think we are going to start a reach-out process maybe over email because I was talking to Trevor and he didn’t know that there was someone he could talk to about issues he was facing, so now I realized I definitely need to send this email. I am working to send this email with office hours and other details. Third point, I have updates on the food pantry, which we will talk about in a bit.

Evan: Looking at VP tasks, today we are going to appoint one person to AAEC.

Noorie: Last week we didn’t get any applications for Commencement Committee. Talking with Franklin, we realized we needed to decide whether or not he would prefer direct appoints by us or if we should re- run appointment. He asked us to reach out to Brian about how to recruit people.

Evan: We met with Michelle this Friday and there are some changes in the appointments timeline. 

Customs Co Head application going out over fall break, interviews will be with us, previous Custom’s co-heads and Mike and Michelle only. We will be constantly updating the doc. Lastly, we are thinking about making a commitment to check in with each of the committees, we are then going to include this in the application process. Whether or not they can commit to checking in with us upfront.

  1. Break Food Options Discussion

Katie L.: Do you guys want to update us on Break Food stuff?

Evan: So this will be a long list and this will be shared with the Student body Monday (tomorrow) night.

Katie L.: Just briefly, is this just sharing information or are you guys also looking for feedback from the group?

Evan: Here are the break pantry updates,

– MCC will be open throughout break, at 11:30am-1:30pm and 5:30pm-7:30pm. They’ll have some dry foods and you can use the kitchen.

– Different departments will offer meal vouchers for DC for students who are interested in meeting with them.

– DC will be open, but you’ll have to pay as you go.

– If you’re eligible for LIFTFAR, you should have received an email from Emily Johnson. She’s giving out vouchers for those staying on campus.

– Haverfarm is providing fresh produce, contact Tilly (mtillman@haverford.edu) for more info.

– International student groups are planning a pantry in HCA 50 (I-Domo)

– There will be a group on Engage with all this info where people can freely access over the break.

  1. SC Librarian Discussion

Katie L.: So we need to appoint a Student Council Librarian per the resolution last year. It’s a very small applicant pool that could be eligible and also it wouldn’t be able to be appointed until December but we would like to appoint this person now because Honor Council needs this person particularly because of the issues around the Constitution.  We’re open to suggestions but options are to 1. presidents appoint someone, 2. Appointments committee can appoint That would also mean sitting in on an extra appointment. Would people mind sharing what they think?

Mariana: We wanted to bring this to you guys and we feel comfortable letting you guys decide because it only affects council and was written through council. 

Devi: Would this just be seeing if the currently only eligible person could do it?

Katie L.: The idea would be to run appointments, trusting we can choose someone, regardless of whether they have been on council or not, who is ready to take on this position.

Eliza: What are the parameters for the eligibility for the position?

Mariana: They have to have prior students’ council experience and they have to serve for 3 semesters.

Sydney: Can we check what the resolution says about the serving time? I thought it was 2 semesters in the end modeled off of HC librarian. But I did sent you that resolution so that would be my bad.

Katie L.: The general sentiment is that we as a council have the ability to have some freedom regarding who can run, since this will only affect our function, not that of the school. So our question is are you comfortable running another appointment slot for the Librarian?

Evan: Because the Custom’s Co-head is just going to be us and not everyone, we have an open slot on October 27th. So if the people signed up can come to that, that would be great.

Mariana: Is this taking into account the Steering Committee appointments?

Evan: Yes, cause we were thinking about doing Steering Committee just between us two (Noorie and I).

Emily: I haven’t checked recently but are the SC appointments on the SC google calendar?

Evan/Noorie: Yea, they are. We need to shift some things around though.

  1. Presidential Updates

Mariana: The Co-VPs and us have decided to run the Steering Committee appointments October 27th.

Essentially, we are just trying to find two people to appoint to this committee. Katie and I will also probably be in this appointments process so that we are selecting people who would be good in this position.

Katie L.: So we will talk with Kim Callahan and Head of Security, regarding the email about the man on the nature trail. We were talking to Wendy about how this worked at her previous institution. At her institution the emails read that they were federally mandated in both the subject and the body, to let the recipients know why they were receiving these messages.

Katie L.: I sent a message about a doc that I shared about how SC, HC and other students are interested in creating a module on self-governance the summer before first years come in. We are thinking about creating a video that quickly gets across the idea of self-governance. If  you have an interest in this or any information that you wish you would have known before Freshman year please contribute.

Mariana: Last thing, save the date for October 24th because this will be a board dinner and Franklin Cantor will be in touch with you to send more information about this. Those are all the updates on our end.

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