Student Union president Ethan Clay met with college government leaders last night to discuss his proposed revisions to the Union constitution, which would make numerous major changes to the Union Senate and Executive Board structures.
The proposed document, which several Union e-board members have been drafting as part of a constitutional revision committee since January, must be ratified by both three-quarters of the senate and two-thirds of college governments by May 1, the last day of spring semester classes.
Clay called the meeting productive and positive and said college government leaders pledged to “do whatever they could to get a [positive] response” to the document.
Three of the governments did not show up to the meeting but expressed their willingness to pass the proposed constitution by the May 1 deadline in an e-mail to Clay earlier in the day, he said.
Clay has asked the Senate to convene a special meeting this weekend so the document can be passed in time, though he said the matter is really out of his control.
“I have suggested the Senate meet on Sunday just to clear up some of their schedule for Monday,” he said. “I am not [allowed] to call a special meeting on Sunday – it is up to the chairperson.”
The document includes many changes, including some as small as renaming positions and others as large as completely restructuring the executive board.
The proposed constitution would rename the executive board a “Cabinet” and would include president, executive vice president, comptroller and vice presidents of academic affairs, residence life, internal affairs and external affairs, shrinking the Union’s executive branch by four positions.
The current constitution includes nine positions on the executive board – president, executive vice president and vice presidents of student affairs, financial affairs, safety services, public relations, multicultural affairs, academic affairs and residence life.
E-board members would be elected together in the spring, with the exclusion of the comptroller, who would be appointed by the Student Union Allocations Board. The comptroller would also not have a vote in the cabinet, while the other positions would.
Clay said positions were consolidated and others created because some were not needed as individualized positions.
“We combined multicultural affairs with student affairs [because] we felt that student affairs are multicultural as well, so it was a bit redundant,” Clay said. “We combined residence life with safety services – it’s not realistic to say that the Student Union is responsible for safety on campus, nor can they police the [campus]. The current constitution is unrealistic when it comes to safety.”
Clay also said the committee eliminated the VP of public relations position because Union officials realized over the last year that each committee on its own could cover the position.
The committee renamed the “Executive Board” to “Cabinet” in order to create branches of government, in this case the executive branch, instead of just boards, Clay said.
“We really didn’t feel that [e-board] was fitting,” Clay said. “We are a branch rather than a board – it’s the executive branch – just as in the United States, we have the president and the cabinet, and we just want to stick to that term – we just feel it is more fitting.”
The proposed constitution says that the vice president of internal affairs “shall be responsible for all matters concerning the student community at Boston University.” The vice president of external affairs “shall be responsible for all matters concerning students in the Greater Boston community.”
The revisions also address the role of the Union’s judicial body, the Tribunal. The proposed revision says their constitutional clarifications can be amended, speaking directly to recent Union controversy.
But, Clay said, the Tribunal’s responsibilities and its ability to issue clarifications, will be looked at more before the revisions are complete.
“Tribunal members definitely have their own situation,” Clay said. “As it stands right now, Tribunal officers are held to a different standard and I think we need to have some discussions as to whether that should be maintained in the future or modified in this revision.”
The Tribunal’s role will be looked at with extreme detail, Clay said.
“The issue of Tribunal is of great interest to the branches of the Student Union and I want to make sure in this revision we either restore the founding fathers’ intention of the Tribunal or we create the direction that we would like this body to move in, and what guidelines they should adhere to,” he said.
The new document would also make changes to the Senate, including adding seven “senior senator” positions, which Senators renamed “senators-at-large” on Tuesday. Senators-at-large would be elected in the spring during e-board elections, and would be required to serve in the Senate for one year before holding the positions.
Under the original proposal, first-year senators would also have been called “junior senators,” though the body quickly eliminated the provision at the meeting.
The proposed addition of senators-at-large disgruntled many senators Tuesday night because they said the seven re-elected senators would collude with e-board slates. During the meeting, senators proposed that “senators-at-large” would represent the university as a whole, while regular senators would represent the constituency by which they were elected.
The proposed constitution, however, is being continually revised and reworded, even after Tuesday night’s recommendations.
Clay said he would most likely still propose changing the names of the two Senate positions again, but said the issue was of little importance to him.
“I can see just striking ‘junior’ but maintaining ‘senior,'” Clay said. “The naming of those [will be] primarily up to senate – for me that is not a very heavy issue.”
The constitution has been revised three separate times since its original draft last weekend, Clay said. One revision was made between Tuesday’s Senate meeting and today. Senators were only able to get through Article 1 of the document, and have not yet been able to discuss other major changes to the constitution, including those to the Executive Branch and Tribunal.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
