Senate passes exam rescheduling resolution, approves projects

The Tufts Community Union (TCU) convened on Sunday night in the Sophia Gordon Multipurpose Room to consider a resolution, a pair of project approvals and club funding requests.

TCU Parliamentarian Adam Rapfogel took the floor to introduce a resolution which called for the university to revise the faculty handbook to allows students to formally reschedule an exam if they have more than three exams in a 48-hour window.

According to Asian American Community Representative Jacqueline Chen, who submitted the resolution with Senator Shannon Lee, the resolution was designed to ease student stress levels.

“Tufts University doesn’t currently have a policy to help students easily move their exams if they have too many in a row,” Chen, a sophomore, said. “Our goal is to fix that problem and alleviate student stress with a new exam policy.”

Lee, a first-year, said the submitted resolution was modeled after other universities’ exam policies such as those of the University of Pennsylvania and Bowdoin College.

“We also looked at peer institutions to see what their policies were and tried to come up with a policy that combined all the best ones that we saw,” Lee said.

During a 10-minute question-and-answer period led by Rapfogel, a sophomore, Chen and Lee answered senators’ queries about the resolutions’ scope.

Chen and Lee said that the proposed policy revision would apply to all exams in a given semester, not only those scheduled during “midterm season,” the loosely defined mid-semester exam period.

The resolution was unanimously passed by a vote of 26-0-0 and will now go before the university’s joint student-faculty Educational Policy Committee for consideration, Lee said.

After the resolution passed, TCU Vice President Shai Slotky, a senior, moved the body to consider two project requests, the first of which was a proposal to create a meal swipe food bank for the use of students who might not otherwise have access to meals. This plan would allow students to contribute their meal swipes and could result in up to 4,000 donated meals over a semester.

Chen, Lee,International Community Representative Celeste Teng and Senator Olive Baerde, who all submitted the proposal, said it was key to expanding food access.

Lee reported that responses to a student survey gauging student interest in the program were “overwhelmingly positive” and that many students responded that they would be willing to contribute their meal swipes to the cause.

After a 10-minute question-and-answer period, the project proposal was unanimously passed. The project’s organizers said they hoped to launch the donation program at the start of next semester.

Next, senator Claudia Aliff submitted a project proposal aimed to have the TCU and the Office of Residential Life and Learning work together to mandate that the university’s 16 special interest houses regularly hold cook nights open to the entire Tufts community.

“We would implement a 16-day rotational schedule,” Aliff, a senior, said. She explained that houses would fund their scheduled cook nights from their programming budgets.

The project proposal passed by a vote of 24 to 1.

TCU Treasurer Chris Leaverton, a sophomore, then led the Senate in reviewing  nine funding requests. Senate approved the Allocation Board’s recommendation to grant an additional $180 to Amnesty International, $900 to Students for Justice in Palestine, $250 to Sarabande Dance Ensemble, $700 to the Coalition for Autism Support at Tufts, $270 to Tufts Engineers Without Borders, $30 to Breakthrough, $550 to Spirit of Color, $2388.09 to the Crafts Center and $1961 to Buddhist Mindfulness Sangha.

TCU Judiciary Historian Parth Patel, a junior, noted that this week the Judiciary recognized the National Abortion Rights Action League, which was formed in the fall 2015 semester.