TCUJ to hold info sessions after rewriting bylaws

The newly-rewritten Tufts Community Union (TCU) Judiciary bylaws, which are meant to hold student groups more accountable and which were recently approved by the Committee on Student Life (CSL), are now going into effect.

The Judiciary is holding two question-and-answer sessions to further clarify any misconceptions about the new bylaws, which will be held in the Mayer Campus Center today, Monday March 9, in room 203 and on Thursday, March 12 at 7 p.m. in room 112.

“The reason we changed the bylaws was because they were not stringent at all,” TCU Judiciary Advocacy Chair Sophia Gomez, a first-year, said. “What was happening was that a lot of the student groups that were poorly run, or that weren’t following the rules, were starting to fall through the cracks.”

Seniors Becky Goldberg and Jonathan Zfira, chair and vice chair of the TCU Judiciary respectively, spoke to Director of the Office for Campus Life Joe Golia about the big issues that were facing student groups, according to Zfira.

“The amount of groups on campus was one of the big issues,” he said. “We want an as inclusive and vibrant community of student groups as possible, but there are some constraints [such as space and funding], so we have to ensure that the groups we have are actually contributing something.”

“We’re moving away from just the group of friends who have a shared interest and more towards an organization that is doing something for the campus,” Goldberg said of the function of student groups.

At a school of roughly 5,000 undergraduate students, Zfira and Goldberg stressed that having 300 recognized student groups with 60 new groups applying for recognition every year is concerning.

“The ratio is off,” Goldberg said.

Although this was the first time in recent memory that the bylaws have been completely rewritten, with the last update being in 2012, Goldberg said the changes are relatively minor.

“To be perfectly honest, we’re just changing language,” she said.

The changes to the bylaws impact three facets of how groups on campus function: their membership requirement, proof of events and funding.

Every semester, each student group must organize three events, although publication groups, performance groups such as S-Factor and traveling groups such as Tufts Mock Trial need only one event or publication each semester, Goldberg noted.

“We’ve always required ‘three proofs of activity,’ but we did change the language to ‘three proofs of events,’” she said, adding that events such as panel discussions and guest speakers that counted before will still count, and that collaborations between groups will count for both groups.

Goldberg made it clear that the groups do not need to do anything out of the ordinary.

“They don’t need to get more funding or book Cohen Auditorium, they just need to have the events with the intent that the group will benefit the rest of the Tufts population,” she said.

“We did this because some people were coming up to us saying [they] put up some posters or tabled in the campus center and that was [their] activity for the semester. That’s great, but if you’re reserving a Campus Center room three times a week and are getting funding from [TCU] Senate, you have to do more than that,” Zfria said.

Groups can now hold open meetings, which other members of the Tufts community can attend, as proof of an event under the new bylaw changes, Goldberg said. Goldberg added that the membership requirements for those meetings have also been reshaped.

“The membership requirement is now and always has been a strict 15. However, we’re being more flexible for religious and cultural groups because we understand the population of those students is less,” she said.

Zfira added that the proof of membership requirements have also been strengthened. “When you have an e-list of 300 people, it’s hard to see who is actually attending the meetings,” he said, explaining that the requirements for meeting attendance — which were previously not enforced — will now be enforced.

Funding for student groups is the last major change involved in the new bylaws.

In the previous bylaws, there was a clause stating that student groups could be recognized without funding. Zfria said that, for a lot of reasons, that was never really used.

“We went through a lot of different iterations to see if that made sense to bring that back or if it made sense to make a tiered system,” Zfira said. “But after a lot of attempts to formulate something that would work between the TCU Judiciary and the CSL, we never really came to an agreement or a mechanism that made sense and that didn’t divide student groups based on funding. We didn’t want a tiered system or a difference in recognition status. So we got rid of all funding requirements.”

Every group that is recognized now has the opportunity to receive funding from the TCU Senate, which is now entirely responsible for regulating funding, according to Zfira.

“This will be more work for the Allocations Board, and it may be a bit harder for groups to get funding, but it will allow all the groups to be on the same level,” Zfria explained.

“We are going about the implementation of the new bylaws in a somewhat gradual way for this upcoming re-recognition process,” Zfira added. “Though we are doing a full-scale evaluation on every re-recognition, we will draw more from the old bylaws. We will be forward about what we need, but if some groups are on the border we will work with them to make sure they understand what we need.”

For example, TCU Judiciary is allowing the three proofs of events to come from September 2014 to present day, instead of just the fall semester. “We don’t want groups to get upset with not understanding what is happening. We want to really promote the bylaws and promote a more involved community,” Gomez said.

“If groups are doing what they are supposed to be doing, they’ll be just fine, and we’ll just be updating them,” she added.