With the academic year fully underway, Tufts Community Union (TCU) senators have started crafting their year-long projects to enhance the Tufts undergraduate experience.
Among the individual projects spearheaded by senators are plans to improve the course registration system and enhance mentorship opportunities for undergraduates.
TCU President Sam Wallis, a senior, said in his Oct. 3 State of the TCU Address that the Senate has more liberty this year to set its own agenda as compared to previous years.
"We're not starting the year with a major issue weighing us down," Wallis said. "So we can focus on whatever we want to."
At the top of the body's to-do list is its plan to implement Referendum 3, which gives community representatives on the Senate full voting rights, including those concerning fiscal matters.
Though Referendum 3 emerged as the winner in the Sept. 22 school-wide vote to reform the community representative system, its proposed changes will not be implemented until April, according to Wallis.
In line with the Senate elections in April to fill next year's positions, the spring deadline for Referendum 3's implementation will allow this year's elected community representatives to serve their terms and give the Senate time to draft the necessary bylaws for the referendum's execution, Wallis said.
TCU Parliamentarian Dan Pasternack, a senior, will create and lead a Rules Committee that will draft bylaw proposals at a future date yet to be determined, according to Wallis.
Wallis is currently working with the Group of Six, the group of culture-related centers at Tufts, and other groups in order to construct a timeframe for action.
Campus-life improvements
Senator Yulia Korovikov, who chairs the Senate's Administration and Policy Committee, said her project to improve the course registration system, while still in an exploratory phase, aims to make signing up for classes a fairer process.
"The current system that class registrations work on is completely random," Korovikov, a sophomore, said. "You could hypothetically get stuck with bad times eight semesters in a row."
Korovikov said she would like to see the registration system operate in a manner similar to the housing lottery system, in which a student's sophomore and senior year numbers balance each other out.
Senator Tabias Wilson, who chairs the Senate's Culture, Ethnicity, and Community Affairs Committee, is also exploring several projects to improve student life.
One of these is a project aimed at making the Tufts campus more accessible to students in wheelchairs.
Wilson, a sophomore, said that the university's campus and buildings are difficult to access for wheelchair-bound individuals.
"If you're rolling yourself up a hill, it's very hard to do because a lot of times there's no entry to the sidewalk for wheelchairs," Wilson said. "And if there is, there's usually a university van parked on that part of the sidewalk."
Wilson is also working on a project to implement gender-neutral bathrooms in dorms. Gender-specific bathrooms, he believes, impose a burden on individuals who do not identify with a conventional gender identity.
"What do they do?" Wilson said. "They have to make that choice and conform at that second and say, ‘Well, am I a male or am I female?'"
Wilson said that although having multi-person gender-neutral bathrooms may be cause controversy, under his plan, the gender-neutral bathrooms would ideally be single-person bathrooms, allowing for student privacy.
Trustee Representative Josh Friedmann is more concerned about what happens to students when they leave Tufts.
Friedmann, a senior, is preparing a proposal to the Board of Trustees to create a mentorship program that would pair seniors with Tufts alumni who work in their professional fields of interest. The program would connect students with individuals who have valuable knowledge of a professional field and provide opportunity for alumni involvement.
"Even if they're not able to donate a ton or come back to campus every year for homecoming, it's another way for people to be involved," Friedmann said.
Friedmann hopes to unite several of the mentorship programs that already exist and centralize them into one office.
"They're all pretty new, they're all entirely separate and they're all things that students have to actively seek out to be involved with," Friedmann said. "My observation is that the students who are actively seeking these things out are not the ones who need the mentors most."
Collaboration with other schools
Senators are also working to improve Tufts' future representation on the Boston Intercollegiate Leadership Council (BILC). Made up of student government leaders from Boston-area colleges and universities, BILC unites students in one conference every semester to share ideas on ways to improve governance on their respective campuses.
Former TCU senator Edward Chao, a senior, was involved in BILC's creation last year.
The Senate last month elected freshman Allie Can Lei and senior Nadia Nibbs as representatives to BILC.
Lei said student governments from the different schools could benefit from an opportunity to share experiences and learn from each other.
"Alcohol policy, things like this, these are issues that every school faces," Lei said.
Representatives from Boston University (BU), Brandeis University, Bentley University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among those which participate in the council.
Nibbs agreed that the conference provides an opportunity for students to more effectively tackle common problems that face many college campuses.
"If we have a coalition of Boston-area schools that, in an organized way, can address some of these larger issues affecting Boston students, we might have more effect," Nibbs said.
Boston College (BC) will host the first BILC meeting this year on Nov. 14, according to Nibbs.
BU hosted the first BILC conference in Spring 2009, and Tufts hosted the second conference last fall. Bentley hosted a third conference in February.
A stamp of legitimacy for projects
The Senate in September implemented changes to its bylaws, which now require senators to present their projects to the full Senate body for approval before lobbying the administration.
Wallis said the new rules prevent individual senators from pursuing individual projects that do not accurately represent the sentiments of the Senate or the student body.
"At least the Senate will know what's going on," Wallis said.
Wallis cited the pre-matriculation policy passed by the faculty in 2009 as one instance when the Senate's overall goals contradicted the work of individual senators. The Educational Policy Committee (EPC) at the time voted to limit the use of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate credits to fulfill distribution requirements.
The two senators then-serving on the EPC supported the policy without the Senate's knowledge. The full body passed a separate resolution in February 2009 opposing the decision, but by that time it was too late to have a substantial impact.
Wallis said that having Senate approval would give individual senators' projects a stamp of legitimacy.
"It's not someone's pet project," Wallis said. "It has the endorsement of the whole student body through Senate. That adds weight to it."
