USG Comments for Dec 15

Academic Integrity Board

Let's clear this thing up. The board is comprised of three students (voting members) that are appointed by the Undergraduate Student Government, two faculty (voting members) appointed by the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate and two administrators (non-voting members). One administrator will be a dean from the office of undergraduate studies. The other administrator, the assistant vice president for student affairs or his or her designee, will chair the board.

USG does not approve all members to the Integrity Board, it only approves the three student positions on it. Now, if USG has not been doing this, then there is a failure of communication. I would have thought the VP Academic Affairs would be aware of such a thing. Perhaps maybe it should be included in the officers' manual for next time.

Archives Still Nothing

I am a strong advocate of giving students the ability to access all USG documents because we are supposed to be a public entity. Come on here, the students elected the government, and they are accountable to them. After two years of politely asking, the Archives section is still saying "Coming Soon." The only place a student can check USG legislation, agendas, and minutes from 1999 to 2004 is here.

It's not that hard. Yes, the creation of the online funding system took up manpower and lots of hours, but uploading scanned copies of minutes and legislation is not that difficult.

As a New Years' resolution, please, pretty please, get all the archives online next semester.

Restricting number of student groups next year

How many active groups are we at currently? A quick look at the groups list off the USG site shows about 144. Five to six years ago, we had roughly 95-100 groups. The increasing trend rate is not too bad, but does this mean we should start restricting people from forming new groups. Not really. We had about 4,300 undergrad students enrolled for the Fall semester. This is up from about 3,400 to 3,500 from several years ago.

Being an officer and member of the Finance Committee is a very hard job, and you cannot put a cap on group membership because there are just too many of them. Obviously, there should be more of an effort to determine if a new group should be recognised by USG and whether it helps improve student life. With an increasing SAF fee every year and a larger funding budget, the Finance Committee should be expected to handle this. This is why we still continue to justify that any candidate running for VP Finance must be a member of the Finance Committee for at least one semester.

A restricted cap on the number of groups is an easy cheapshot solution. Another more effective solution needs to be made instead of this.

It would also be nice to know how much money has been requested from all the student groups. Every mass funding bill that has been passed only shows what has been allocated. A summary report of what was requested and funded should be available off the USG web site. If it is, let me know.

The Smoking Open Forum

First, an open forum is a place to communicate and exchange ideas for anyone concerned. Now, I would have thought the forum would be the initial starting point to bring up solutions and debate them to tackle the issue of smoking on campus. By introducing the three USG draft resolutions on the subject, it would seem to me that you have already "mostly" decided on what should be the solution to this problem and the forum is used for just feedback. Observer's take on it showed that the forum could have been used more effectively.

The forum should have just focused on three areas regarding smoking: an outright ban on it, designated smoking areas, and areas where smokers are not allowed. No draft resolutions should have been introduced. You want to give the sense that "everything is on the table for debate."

After this, a task force study group should been created to debate the finer points of writing up the draft resolution. The smoking topic would undoubtedly affect everyone on campus, so it would be favorable to include graduate and professional students. This would give an united student viewpoint to the administration. Of course, future open forums would also be needed.

Giving students to vote on three separate smoking referendums seems friviolous. First, an outright ban is not the ideal solution and should be subsequently dropped. Sufficient smoking shelters should be erected throughout campus, and designated certain floors or residence halls for smokers should be considered. This would make quite a lot of sense to most people. Areas that should be off-limits to smokers such as ventilation systems, building entrances is obvious.

Imagine if the outright ban was the winning resolution, it would make resolution two and three unnecessary, but for the University, it is not the ideal way to solve this problem, so then it is a waste of time for USG.

Eastwood's suggestion of a program to help end smoking addiction is a great idea and should be included in any USG comprehensive resolution.

In any case, more work is definitely needed on this hot topic.

A smoking referenda during the first two weeks of classes is much too soon and will NOT be conducive. How can you have an open forum on Nov 21, then decide two weeks later to hold a referenda when students get back?

Student turnout will not be high. Students would not have all the facts to make the right decision. It would show that the open forum was meaningless. I would actually want to see the draft that was presented at the forum and the final version. Was there any change? =) =) =)