Senate lacks cohesion, Fajardo says

Just over two months ago, when Boston University senators assembled in Photonics 210 for the first time, inexperienced and saddled by doubts of their legitimacy, they soundly rejected one of President Ethan Clay’s presidential appointments as one of their first official acts.

Would-be Student Union Election Commissioner Chris Pedersen went home jobless that night, and with him, according to Senate Chairman Joel Fajardo, the Senate sent a message about its resolve that he said has persisted throughout the semester.

‘I think that one of the greatest things about the Senate so far is that they’re really passionate and they’re educated,’ Fajardo said. ‘Even when it comes to simple things, they don’t let the E-board take advantage of them like they did last year.

‘Being really intuitive has really helped the senate a lot,’ he said.

Second-year Sen. Marietta McEvilly (University Professors) said she has seen significant differences between this year’s senate and last year’s.

‘I think this year’s Senate asks a lot more questions,’ McEvilly said. ‘Last year’s senate just kind of blindly accepted things. We were just doing what sounded right at the moment.’

‘I think it was hard [this year] because it was a very new senate; there were very few returning senators. Everybody had to come together and learn the procedure, and I think we’re a better-informed senate than last year.’

But despite a willingness to defy the E-board early, Fajardo said that resolve alone has not been and will not be enough to ensure success. According to Fajardo, the senate lacks the cohesion and leadership to realize its full potential as a muscle of the student body.

So now, with one meeting remaining in the first semester of the year, the BU Senate finds itself hung between competing urges to resist the E-board’s influence and look to the executive body’s structure and unity as a blueprint for success, Fajardo said.

According to its chairman, the Senate’s biggest failure this semester has been its inability to ‘find and realize a unified goal.’

‘The Senate lacks one central leader to unify them,’ Fajardo said. ‘There isn’t one central leader that is both knowledgeable and influential. We still haven’t found something to unify all of us. I really can’t be that person that unifies them; that’s just not the way that my role has been defined in precedent.’

‘I have noticed that, that there’s a lack of unity,’ said freshman Senator Meredith Rutrick (Warren Towers). ‘It could be attributed to the fact that we only meet once a week and that we don’t have time to be friends with each other. It might be better if we had more time to share our views with each other but that’s how it’s set up.

‘I’m not criticizing the way the Senate is run,’ she added.

This disunity has hobbled the Senate’s ability to complete projects, Fajardo said, citing the letter senators drafted detailing student concerns and to be distributed to parents unofficially over Homecoming Weekend. Rather than table the letter until a later meeting, allowing senators to look it over and make corrections, Sen. Caila Ball (College of Communication), the letter’s sponsor, led her colleagues through an hours-long, paragraph-by-paragraph debate over its wording.

Because BU does not allow university groups to run programs over that weekend, the senators had to gather ‘unofficially’ on their own time to pass the letter out. By the following Monday, senators had distributed only 225 to 250 copies, far below the Senate’s expectations, Fajardo said.

‘[The letter] had a lot of good ideas behind it, but if they had a clearer goal going into it they might have been more successful,’ he said. ‘The Senate is not a project-oriented group and, as a result of that, they’re not always confronted with getting these projects up and running.’

‘Nothing sticks out in my mind that it should be called a failure because that’s a harsh word, but I wish that the parent letter had been taken farther than it was or that we could have done more,’ Rutrick said.

And the Senate is trying to do more.

In response to the disappointing numbers, several senators proposed a new special Information Committee to retool the letter among other initiatives to disseminate information about BU to students and parents. According to Fajardo, the committee plans to have a shined-up version ready by the end of the month or early January.

‘I don’t think that we really had a failure with any of our projects,’ McEvilly said. ‘You could view the parent letter as not a success the first time around, but they picked it up.’

But several senators have relayed their concerns about the Senate’s incapacity to Fajardo, he said. And it’s something he said has prompted him to reconsider the Senate’s role in the Student Union as a whole.

‘I’ve talked to all of them and there’s a sense of frustration,’ he said.

The solution, Fajardo said, is the Senate should look to the E-board as a model of initiative and cohesion.

‘I think that the Senate does need the E-board’s help because it is a unified small group,’ Fajardo said, also citing the board’s solid connections with university administrators and student groups.

‘What it really comes down to is that the Senate should look to the E-board for support just like the E-board looks to the Senate for support, and that’s one of the most unfortunate things I’ve seen this year,’ Fajardo said. ‘When the E-board has initiatives, they get sole credit for it.’

As an example, Fajardo cited the BUnited Bus Lines, which ferried BU students up and down the East Coast last week. According to Fajardo, the Senate’s Student Affairs Committee was integral in offering the buses and the $5 shuttle to Logan Airport this year, but the E-board got most of the credit.

‘We are bigger, so it’s harder,’ Rutrick said of the comparison between the Senate and the E-board. ‘It’s harder when there’s 40 of us.’

But in spite of the Senate’s size, Rutrick said committee work has been the engine behind the Senate’s successes so far this semester.

‘I think that one of the reasons that I, and everyone to whom I’ve spoken, have been so productive is because we work in little committees with stuff in which we’re interested.’

Among those successes Rutick counted the resuscitation of the BUnited Bus Lines as one of the most satisfying.

Recalling the story of a student with no other way to get home, Rutrick said, ‘I think that’s something to be really proud of. I couldn’t appreciate it until today that it had made such an impact on the student body.’

As for next semester, Rutrick said the Senate would face many of the same challenges that it met back at its first meeting on Oct. 1, most importantly, visibility.

‘I think that it was a challenge to get past the fact that the student body might not hear about some of the actions that the Senate is taking for some reason or another,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to accomplish something when you first have to rally support. Because the student body is so big, that’s the first task.’

Fajardo, who has been campaigning to increase Senate visibility since he was elected last fall, said drawing student attention is one of the main reasons he invited Chancellor John Silber to speak before the Senate next Tuesday.

‘Staying unified, staying on top of things and staying motivated’ will be the Senate’s biggest challenges, McEvilly said. ‘We’re going to be away for about a month, and I think you lose some of your motivation when you’re away for so long. You lose touch with the other senators and the student body. I don’t think it will be too much of a problem, but it will slow us down a bit.’

By the numbers, though, this year’s Senate has made marked improvements over last year. This year’s Senate has incurred only four resignations, half the number of last year’s Senate at the mid-point. And two of those resignations, by Mike Bodek and Mike McLaughlin, were so the two could advance to higher Union positions.

And, according to Fajardo, with the exception of the last two meetings that flanked a holiday weekend, attendance has consistently peaked above 90 percent.

Of a semester that has seen the Senate weather an elections controversy, a stand-off with the press and the resignation of its vice-chair two weeks ago, McEvilly said, ‘I think it’s a success in that we organized together and came together.’