Meeting Minutes for October 07, 2012

Meeting #3

Introduction

Mr. Easop: Welcome to another fine week of Senate! I’m excited to see some projects underway! Voting for elections starts tomorrow at noon. Make sure you advertise the link to vote—let freshman know! Also, exciting news is that today Greg will be presenting the Midyear Report. Then we’ll talk about the Project Planning Form to see where we’re headed. And then the Presidential Search Committee has been finalized. We’ll hear the results on that soon. Would anyone like to approve the minutes?

Motion passes.

MYR Presentation

Mr. Smith: I’d like to thank Erin for designing that cover for us. In the Executive Summary, we have a write up of major events—its for people who don’t have time to read the full report. We have the President’s letter and VP’s letter after this. This is will be put on the website in a couple of days. We also want your suggestions and comments on how we can improve for the Annual Report, and how we can make it less stressful for Senate members.

Mr. Easop: Could you scroll up to the President’s letter? I wanted to pick out a few themes. As we look back on the past semester, we want to highlight some of the internal changes.  A few things we tried to emphasize were: building relations (mental health week, UBikes), communications and transparency (implementation groups, Presidential search committee), and fiscal responsibility (Monthly updates on budgets, strengthening internal funding requests). As we look internally to some shifts, these are some neat things to reflect on.

Mr. Stolzenberg: Considering that the five minutes is basically up, and we discussed how we could do it better, let’s move on to the Project Planning form.

Project Planning Form Review

Mr. Smith: The “2012 Project and Goals” handout is a list of every Senate Project which has bullet points of major goals for the project. Let’s look at the handout and ask some questions about it. We can also talk about Project Updates and Project Drop-ins.

Mr. Stolzenberg: Let’s take a minute to read over this.

Ms. Davoudiasl: For “Taste of Prospect,” can we somehow include independent students in the process?

Ms. Aliviatsos: I feel like this is more of an event instead of a “panel.”

Mr. Rajagopalan: I would argue for co-ops instead of independents.

Ms. Clifton: Where is Restaurant Week?

Mr. Smith: That is both a CCA and Senate project.

Mr. Jackson: For Mental Health is it just going to be a survey and report? Or a full week again?

Mr. Easop: I think we’ll do it next semester because of the way our breaks work. This semester, we’ll work with CPS and their liaison with the residential colleges.

Mr. Kugelmass: Who are the leaders of the students’ event calendar?

Ms. Davoudiasl: Me.

Mr. Easop: Please send this out to the Senate.

Mr. Smith: The second part of this was project updates and project drop-ins. Please send a few sentences of what you’ve done. I’ll send out a first email Wednesday and try to get them in by the meeting. The project drop-ins mean that we’ll try to come at least once to every projects meeting; we’ll let you know a week in advance. This will give us a more hands-on feel of what issues you guys are facing and you’re doing. It’s a way to try and connect the President, VP, and myself with the Projects groups. This will give us a more in-depth look, rather than just relying on the 3-4 sentences.

 

CPUC Recap

Ms. Kim: Elektra and I are going to present on the CPUC meeting last week. To give a rundown of what happened, the Office of Disabilities came and said they’ve done a lot to improve the lives of disabled students on campus. They’ve done a lot of work with mental health; so far they’ve only done work for students who came in self-identifying with psychological illnesses, but now they’re expanding to students with developmental disorders. Then, in terms of Academic Integrity, there was nothing groundbreaking. It was a reflection/town hall. What wasn’t on the agenda was the “Academic Calender Set-up Procedure”—we asked what the roadblock was to having exams before winter break. Tilghman told us that six years ago, there was a discussion about this but since there was no strong consensus, there was no need to switch.

Mr. Okuda-Lim: If there were changes to the academic calendar, wouldn’t the faculty have to vote? In terms of academic integrity, Bruce mentioned something about having information directly accessible on Blackboard. A lot of the discussion was about making collaboration very clear to the student bodies.

Ms. Davoudiasl: Haven’t we demonstrated multiple times in multiple surveys that the students really want to have the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off?

Mr. Rosen: Yes, but there are other concerns, like students will just skip a whole week. They’re looking for overwhelming demand for changing the calendar for winter break.

Mr. Rajagopalan: I know Catherine last year was trying to work last year about getting the whole week off, and starting the academic calendar 3 days earlier.

Mr. Kugelmass: A lot of JPs are due before Christmas, so independent work isn’t the reason for having exams after break.

Monthly Expenses

Ms. Cartwright: This is from September. This looks pretty normal for the start of the year, and everything from Projects Board looks fine.  I’m under the impression that Projects Board knows what they’re doing. If anyone has an opinion on this, or wants further information not on this sheet, let me know.

Mr. Kugelmass: For Projects Board, is this the amount they’ve asked for or the amount they spent?

Ms. Bui: A lot of the time, the money these groups ask for is not the money they are allocated. They follow up with us to tell us how they spend their money.

Ms. Kim: Projects Board doesn’t allow t-shirts but they do buttons?

Ms. Bui: Well, those weren’t “giveaways”—because they made the buttons.

Mr. Blumenfeld: Are we supposed to “approve” money over $1000?

Mr. Easop: Yup.

Mr. Riley: Well, it may be over $1000, but it’s split between USG and ODUS?

Ms. Cartwright: Well, this left our account.

Mr. Dunn: Projects Board knows to bring anything over $1000 to USG; this is well known.

Mr. Blumenfeld: Well PDA and PEP both spent over $1000.

Mr. Sharp: This is a good time to discuss where the oversight is… I appreciate this list, but we shouldn’t be surprised by the amounts of money that are on here. Where was the link in the change broken?

Mr. Blumenfeld: It sounds like a mistake—it sounds like they know what they need to do.

Mr. Kugelmass: It’s possible to get grants and then spend a smaller amount of money. I don’t know how Projects Board handles this and wants to handle this in the future.

Mr. Dunn: They audit the accounts.

Mr. Easop: We’ll follow up with the two items over $1000 dollars. Also, Projects Board does have office hours. Please attend those!

 

Fitness Classes

Mr. Rajagoplan: We’ve done this in the past and they’ve been very successful. It’s similar to last year, but this year has a bit more of a promotional element to it. We want to keep this fitness classes up; there will be programs on Fridays and Saturdays. When we start pursuing other funding avenues for classes, we want to show how successful they are. Attendance ranged from 150-250 people for Zumba parties. We added some variety to some of the classes to get different demographics of people.

Ms. Kim: I think this number is missing a unit… is $2,175 per semester?

Ms. Davoudiasl: What are the T-shirts?

Mr. Rajagoplan: With giveaways, they saw more attendance. This is part of the “promotional” aspect, and obviously this is debatable. But the way fitness classes work is that when you go, you drag in friends. So attendance has upward trends. And whenever they had promotional giveaways, it would create network effects.

Mr. Easop: Pending approval for the funding, Campus Rec puts up some type of schedule. Could you pass that on to Linda or me so we can put it on the website?

Mr. Blumenfeld: Considering how much food we give away, this is appropriate.

Mr. Blumenfeld makes a motion to approve. The motion passes.

Agenda Setting

Ms. Shen: I wanted to explain why the Cane Spree update isn’t on the agenda this week. It’s primarily because I’m waiting for numbers, but next week I’m requesting 5 minutes for the agenda, just because then I will have numbers about how many people swiped in, etc.

Mr. Easop: One other thing is to reach out to the directors of student life at each residential college and ask them to speak, just because I think they’re a great resource to connect to under-classmen. Also Julian will have elections results. And the SGRC will be presenting new student groups.

Ms. Shen: Will we be having a discussion with class governments on OBB?

Mr. Easop: Yes, in Excom.

Mr. Sharp: Can people who are interested in that be involved?

Mr. Easop: The Excom meeting is an initial meeting that will hopefully come into the Senate after.

Ms. Davoudiasl: Shawon and I would like to present on Clash of the Colleges.

Mr. Rajagopalan: Could we have five minutes to debrief on how the Presidential Search committee went?

Mr. Stolzenberg: It won’t be ready for next week.

Mr. Kugelmass: Can we have the Sexual Culture committee present next week?

Mr. Sharp: This is not an agenda item, but the Bike Rack is being shipped. There will be an update once it’s installed.