This week, seduced by the beautiful weather, the Georgetown University Student Association Senate convened its weekly meeting on Healy lawn. Senators reclined on the grass as their fellow students blissfully threw footballs and beanbags and held a relaxed, banal Senate session, with no new legislation coming up for a vote.

Club Funding and SAC: The meeting featured a briefing from the Finance and Appropriations Committee, whose chair, Nick Troiano (COL ’11) said that his committee had created a draft budget for comment and appeal, but that the committee had received no comments or appeals.

Senator Greg Laverriere (COL ’12) provided a briefing on his meeting with representatives from the Student Activities Commission and University administrators. He said they had managed to compromise on several of the issue but still disagreed over open voting, which GUSA believes SAC should institute.

SAC has resisted open votes, noting that the nature of the votes can be very controversial. Laverriere said that several compromises had been proposed, including a trial run of open voting that could be ended if the process proved disastrous, but none of them had been agreed upon. Laverriere suggested that ultimately the university might select an impartial administrator to settle the dispute.

Executive Briefing: Both GUSA President Calen Angert (MSB ’11) and Vice-President Jason Kluger (MSB ’11) provided briefings at the meeting. Angert said that he and Kluger had been making changes to the executive board.

“We’re definitely expanding the executive board in terms of size,” said Angert.

Angert also said that over spring break the GUSA Summer Fellows had received a $6,000 private donation, and that the application for the Summer Fellows Program would be online beginning today.

Time for the last reading of the Dowdometer, the machine that measures now-former GUSA President Pat Dowd’s success at living up to low expectations. The red bar is my expectations.

Pat grew his mustache today because he’s looking to live the life only available to Thomas Friedman. Describing his trip to Finland, Pat said (emphasis added):

“I got a Thomas Friedman level of access when I was there to ask questions. The trip was really cool, because I got a chance to take all the theory and conceptual stuff I learned at Georgetown and apply it to a real issue,” Dowd said.

I don’t know about that, but if “Thomas Friedman level of access” means stripping down to your birthday suit, here is Pat Dowd naked. The Dowdometer was very pleased when I fed that JPEG into its disk drive, so that may account for the sky-high rating today.

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