Student Senate divides into academic association meetings for the first time to discuss results from a poll sent out earlier this month.
Student Senate members split into groups Wednesday night to address specific problems within each Ohio University college program in lieu of their typically full-body meeting.
This style of meetings, the result of a change in senate rules adopted last week that did away with weekly meetings, is to create a platform for greater student involvement, senators have said.
“A system that asks people directly what they think builds confidence,” said Tyler Barton, resident coordinator at OU Residential Housing.
Senate sent out an email to the student body Wednesday afternoon explaining its meeting schedule for the remainder of the semester, which includes just one more general body meeting. Senate will seek to promote the meeting dates and times through programs such as a poster campaign.
There will be no meetings during Thanksgiving break or finals week, according to the email.
“Associations are run by students, for students, to advocate for our mutual needs at all levels of the university. They are specifically used to build communal power among individuals and existing organizations,” senate wrote in the email.
Also on Wednesday, prior to splitting into break-out groups, senate approved an LGBTQ Affairs Commission budget and new SAC rules.
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Will Klatt, vice governmental affairs commissioner, presented the results of a Student Senate survey sent out to undergraduate students earlier this month.
“I was pretty surprised by these results,” Klatt said. “I think we’ve had a lot of anecdotal conversations with students who have said essentially, top administrators get paid too much, that student workers get paid too little, and student voices are not respected and valued on campus.”
More than 500 students responded to the survey weighing in on issues such as student wages, administrator pay, and the cost of tuition.
One of the questions that received the strongest percentage of opposition — 52 percent — focused on the new student athletic center.
“Students on campus feel uncomfortable with the way the student athletic center has been put forward by the university,” Klatt said. “There are concerns about whether students will be paying for the cost of a service that will only be provided to some students on campus. That’s an area that there needs to be some significant clarification.”
Student senate plans to use the poll results to determine which issues are most important to students and then take action.
“In a lot of ways this is a wakeup call for the university,” Klatt said of the poll. “This is the first of hopefully many attempts to engage the student body in a way that’s more democratic, more open and more participatory.”
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Also at the meeting, Zainab Kandeh, the senate treasurer, addressed an error in The Post last week in which a photo caption incorrectly identified her as Jolana Watson, a candidate for treasurer on last spring’s Restart ticket.
Kandeh, a senior studying broadcast journalism, said she didn’t understand how an inadvertent mix up of the two black student leaders could have been made.
The Post’s editor-in-chief Jim Ryan has called the publication’s error “idiotic,” arguing in his weekly column that the newspaper had made an honest mistake.
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