The greatest achievement for the Boston University Student Union this semester was opening up a better dialogue between students and administrators, Union President James Sappenfield said.
Union held its final General Assembly meeting of the semester Monday night in the College of Arts and Sciences with about 30 Union representatives in attendance. They focused on strategies for continuing to improve communication for next semester between Union and students, and with administrators.
Sappenfield said the increase in communication and better ‘representation with administration offices’ is largely tied to changes Union brought for the print quota.
‘We have very healthy relations with the Internet Technology [sic] office now because of this, which will definitely help us with representation in the future,’ she said in an email.
Last Thursday Union reached a settlement with administrators that decreased the cost of additional printing outside the 100-page quota from 12 cents per page to 8 cents per page.’
Union spokeswoman Amy Mahler said she is proud of this achievement, although it is less than what Union was pursuing.’
‘We need to expect these big policy changes to take a while,’ Mahler said. ‘There are so many students who depend on this. The last thing we want is for students to get disenfranchised in the process.”
Many committee chairs emphasized an increased focus on communicating with students in order to better represent their views next semester.’
Anant Shukla, head of the Print Quota Task Force, said student involvement has been a problem in the past.’
‘Ideally, I would love for ordinary students to be involved with things like print quota and other issues,’ Shukla said. ‘But it’s tough to fill a room with 17,000 individuals. I’m confident that the desires of students have been well represented by the Union, but I would love to have more students directly involved.’
Many students who did not attend the meeting said they had little to no knowledge of Union’s progress.
‘I heard about the print quota, but otherwise I really have no idea what the Union actually does,’ School of Management senior Natalie Stefano said. ‘I don’t know enough about what they do to know what they could improve upon.’
‘I think I would be interested in it if they publicized their activities more,’ School of Theology first-year Masha Stine said.
Mahler said one of Union’s publicity initiatives is a weekly event called ‘Meet the SU in the GSU,’ in which Union will host a table in the George Sherman Union Link every Wednesday from 3 to 5 p.m. for students to voice their opinions to representatives.’
‘We are going to go full throttle next semester,’ Mahler said.’ ‘Now that we have these task forces specifically developed to be the most efficient, we can attempt to make that outreach.’
Sappenfield also said he wanted to focus more on lobbying on behalf of students rather than trying to get them to participate directly.’
‘It’s very hard to encourage students to come to General Assembly meetings,’ Sappenfield said. ‘That’s why next semester we will be focusing on advocating directly for students. We hope to be more of an interest group than just an organization of students.”
Sappenfield acknowledged that other Union goals were neglected this semester in order to focus on establishing efficient systems, increasing communication with administrative offices and achieving a settlement on print quota.’
Some of these aims, many of which Union representatives said they plan to direct attention towards next semester, include gender neutral housing, contextual transcripts, which would display students grades as compared to averages for each class and the implementation of a university-wide absence policy, allowing for three excused absences from each class.’
‘I don’t think goals have fallen by the wayside as much as had to be modified to account for certain situations,’ Sappenfield said. ‘Our first priorities were print quota and establishing communication with the administrators.”
Union also has plans to draft a Student Bill of Rights and make progress with registration reform.’
Shukla said he is in the process of drafting a plan to alter the current registration system. He said he has met with Undergraduate Education Associate Provost Victor Coelho to potentially’ allow ‘an automatic waiting list’ that would be put students into a class when a spot opened up online.
‘This would remove administration overhead, reduce class holding and give students a sense of ease instead of having to check Student Link all the time,’ Shukla said. ‘The Registrar’s office is now discussing how to implement this for Fall 2011.’
Sappenfield said the progress this fall has laid the groundwork for more drastic changes next semester.’
‘We’ve seen a myriad of communication channels opening up with administrators and we are seeing a more real time response,’ he said.
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