GUSA Meeting Rundown: SCUnity rumble
Posted by: Lillian Kaiser in News, Vox Populi, tags: GUSA RoundupThe long and the short of GUSA is mostly long this week; the GUSA meeting clocked in at a whopping two and a half hours, and the best (and ultimate longest) part is yet to come.
GUSA President Pat Dowd (SFS ’09) started off the night by announcing that funds have been raised to start a Hindi language program next year. Namaste!
But Dowd’s briefing proved the agenda’s only straightforward issue. Besides an election bylaws snafu, the big-ticket item was a vote on whether or not to support Brian Kesten’s (COL ’10) long-awaited and earnestly long-winded SCUnity initiatives.
Unfortunately, the Senate didn’t make it to the actual vote, but in the hour of discussion that preceded it, the conversation touched on everything from specific proposals, (a suggestion to mandate a three four white student-to-one minority student ratio in freshman dorms was hotly debated), to the big picture.
At one point, Tyler Stone (COL ’09), who scolded Kesten last week for circumnavigating GUSA’s authority, asked him in all seriousness, “What is diversity to you?”
In light of such lofty questions, the Senate tabled the vote to approve the proposals until next week’s meeting. Expect a lot of fireworks. Those in favor of the initiatives fiercely defend them as a chance to take real action on a problem that has long needed a solution. Opponents seem to share the fiesty Nick Troiano’s (COL ’11) opinion: that you can’t “force diversity down people’s throats.”
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CORRECTION: Brian Kesten notified me that the policy for mandating racial diversity on the floors of freshman dorms would have a ratio of four white students to one student of a racial minority, instead of 3:1.
I think everyone agrees that the work of the commission is impressive and noble. Wherever the debate leads I think that the commission and those involved in it should be really proud of what they accomplished.
My first concern was already written on this blog – that despite an up or down vote by the Senate, the recommendations (which are subjectively concluded from the data collected) already have a tacit seal of approval from GUSA. Although it seems to too late to rectify that issue.
But the Senate, as said multiple times last night, ought to consider each proposal very carefully – to do both justice to the time the commission put into the work and to the importance of the topic before us.
My personal opinion is that diversity is something that needs to be fostered and strived towards in an open and voluntary way. I feel the various suggestions the final report presents seem to mandate diversity (in particular the racial quotas in living spaces). That is both impractical and undercuts the mission in my view.
But I find many of the other suggestions very easy to implement to and very beneficial to the student body if they are (such as programming and education around freshman orientation).
No one in the Senate opposes diversity. We just see different ways of arriving there.
How can you mandate a ratio, if students, by and large, choose their own roommates? Do we replace people’s roommates? Or if students don’t choose a roommate, do we purposefully foist someone of another race? And do international students count as minorities?
In the presentation, they suggested achieving the ratio by organizing roommate pairs, not roommates themselves. They wouldn’t interfere with CHARMS but rather position the pairs so that the floor they ended up on reflected that ratio.
[...] in last week’s GUSA coverage was a bit about GUSA President Pat Dowd’s (SFS `09) latest, and perhaps last crusade: raising [...]
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