Seeing as we can’t add Erik Paulson as an editor on the blog, consider this a guest post…

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I’m a member of the Student Council, one of five reps from the Graduate School. Muckrackers has kindly agreed to carry a guest post to talk about the next ASM meeting. I’m going to tell you everything that I know about this meeting, which is not a lot. The scary thing? I probably know more than most council members. It’s hard to imagine how we expect students to have any idea of what we’re talking about when we barely know. Continuing a Muckracker’s tradition, hopefully this will both shame and inform.

If you’ve got comments about any agenda item, you can send mail to any council member – all of our email addresses are on the ASM website. You can also speak at Open Forum – any student has a right to 3 minutes to speak about whatever they want.

(I won’t actually be at this meeting because I had a conflict, but this Friday night was the night that had the fewest conflicts so I lost the scheduling vote in May.)

Associated Students of Madison

Student Council, 16^th Session

6:30 PM; 8 May, 2009

Hearing Room, Student Activity Center, 333 E. Campus Mall

1. Roll Call Summer Session is usually pretty light, but we might have 20-ish people there, which is much better than years past.
2. Swearing in of New Representatives – None, but there are some vacancies and people who want serve. There’s a special student who probably “won” an election (it was a 4-way tie, each with 1 vote. Two of the people who got a vote were asked by the SEC to serve but said no, but he never got contacted about serving.) He came to Open Forum last month and basically said “WTF?” We also have openings for a freshman (serve til October), a School of Ed student, and a student from Human Ecology. No one seems to know how to officially declare a seat vacant, and the bylaws are no help. Maybe by next meeting…
3. Open Forum 3 Minutes per person, for up to 45 minutes, first come, first serve. We can optionally extend it.
4. Removal or Impeachment of Representatives, Filling of Vacancies in the Student Council and Swearing In of New Representatives. See II. Why two items of ‘Swearing In of New Representatives?” Because the ASM Bylaws have a bug and we have to have it on there twice. The Bylaws need a good scrubbing.
5. Adoption of the Agenda
6. Reading and Approval of the Minutes Too bad you can’t read them, or any from the 16^th session yet. We don’t actually have them ahead of time, so unless we can find an error in 30 seconds they’re basically just approved.
7. Special Orders
1. Committee and Board Appointments
1. Diversity Committee This probably shouldn’t be Special Orders, but whatever. My understanding is that this is for Grad Representative Elizabeth Wrigley-Field to be appointed to the Diversity Committee. I haven’t heard of anyone else who wants to be appointed to the Diversity Committee. We are limited to five council seats on the Diversity Committee, and we might already have that. If the meeting minutes were online, I could check to see who else is on the committee, but they’re not. (She can still serve on it because it’s an “open committee”, which means any UW student can be a part of the committee. However, each council member is required to serve on a committee, and the 5-person limit has traditionally been understood to mean that if there are more than five on a committee, not everyone gets to count their service towards their requirement and has to serve on something else)
2. Adoption of Fall Semester Campaigns This will be the big agenda item for the evening. If Open Forum is short, we should get to this by about 6:20. The meeting has to end at 9pm, and this could easily take up the entire meeting. More likely, we discuss it until 8:30, postpone it until July, and finish the rest of the agenda. See below for more discussion.
8. Old Business
9. New Business
1. Approval of Nominations Board Recommendations Noms board is forwarding Tim Hogan and Kathyrn Fifield as nominees for justices with the Student Judiciary and Charlie Marcus for the SSFC Accountability Liaison. (The SSFC Accountability Liaison job is to basically go to all of the student services groups we fund like GUTS, Wisconsin Student Lobby, WISPIRG, and make sure that they’re actually providing the services they say they are. This person does not have a vote on the SSFC, but works for the SSFC) We should also have the Shared Governance PA nominated by Friday. (We’ve done all the interviews, just checking some references.)
2. Appeal to the Regents. Your guess is as good as mine.
3. Student Savings Club I have no idea what this is about. I wonder if it’s important or why anyone should care about it. A late email from Chair Tyler Junger tells me that it’s someone who wants to start a “savings club”, and it will take some money to do so and he’ll have more information on Thursday afternoon.
10. Reports of Special Committees
1. Safety Campaign We don’t have anyone appointed to this, so nothing
2. UHS/SAC Standing Board I think this is a bylaws bug, and has been replaced by the SAC Governing Board
3. Bus Pass Advisory Committee No idea if who’s on this or if they even know they should reporting Friday night.
11. Reports of Standing Committees and Boards Nearly all the chairs write their report, but those written versions never get posted. It’d be nice if they were posted ahead of time, so non-council members would have an idea of what’s going on, and so we didn’t all have to sit there listening to someone read them to us. The committee chairs all meet in a “Coordinating Council”, so they all know what to expect coming into this meeting, but the rest of us, and any student who might be interested in attending has no idea unless they show up and listen.
1. Academic Affairs Committee They had a drop off for the book swap, Don’t know what else they’ve been up to.
2. Diversity Committee No idea what, if anything, they’ve done this month.
3. Finance Committee The finance committee will meet for the first time an hour before the council meeting, so all they’ll manage to do is elect their officers. They don’t really need to get started until July anyway when the fiscal year starts and there’s grant money available.
4. Foundation Hiring Committee This is a bylaws bug and should be removed.
5. Legislative Affairs Committee I know they met, I think on Study Day, but no idea what they’re doing. Too bad, because this is the state budget for the next two years is being written this week 6 blocks from the ASM offices, but Leg Affairs was so badly broken for two years they’re just not geared up for any serious lobbying effort.
6. Nominations Board See earlier.
7. Shared Governance Committee Probably not much. Nearly all Shared Gov committee are done until August.
8. StudentPrint Board No idea. Do they even know they should be reporting tonight?
9. SAC Governing Board. They’re meeting for the first (maybe second?) time on Friday as well. The Wisconsin Signers want after-hours access, they’re going to talk about Move-Out night, and continue discussing what the Caf? on the 3^rd floor should be like.
10. External Affairs. This should be on the agenda, but it’s not, again because of a bylaws bug. Probably haven’t done much, there are only three members of the committee (Vice Chair Tom Templeton, L&S Rep Jonah Zinn, and Grad Rep Matt Tobelmann)
12. General Reports
1. Chair Tyler sent out an email to council 2.5 weeks ago detailing his meeting with the Chancellor, so he may recap that (basically – SAFE program administration costs are going to be part of seg fees. The SSFC had voted not to fund them, the Chancellor overruled SSFC. The Chancellor also overruled the SSFC and restored security funding to the Union.) There’s also a working group being formed to plan for the Madison Initiative oversight committee (yes, a committee to create a new committee). Finally, ASM might have sent people to the Provost candidates public presentations. He probably has more to talk about, but you’ll have to show up to find out. Again, it’d be nice if the reports were available ahead of time so students could know if they should show up.
2. Vice-Chair United Council had a 2-day meeting in Madison last week, and that’s sort of been Vice Chair Tom Templeton’s thing, so he’ll probably talk about that. We’ve also been screwed out of our booth space at SOAR because of the move to Engineering. We were hoping to find new space, but I don’t know if we found any or if ASM still has a presence at SOAR. Show up to find out if he’s got more 🙂
3. Student Judiciary I doubt they have anything
4. Student Services Finance Committee. They’ve elected leadership – Brandon Williams is chair, Michael Romenesko is Vice Chair, and Matthew Manes is Secretary. No idea what else to expect.
13. Reports of Liaisons We don’t have any, so this is a bylaws bug.
14. Viewpoint Neutrality Appeals Still too early for these! When we start student group funding in the fall, we may start getting them.
15. Announcements
16. Roll Call

Campaign Ideas

This is an unordered list of campaign ideas. The end goal is to pick a handful of campaign ideas for the fall- maybe two, three at most. At the last meeting, we tried but ran out of time to refer these ideas to various committees to discuss the feasibility of ideas and to try and create a more concrete proposal, so we’re sort of back at square one. I have no idea how this discussion is going to work, which is why I think it’s going to take 2 hours and still not get done.

There’s another campaign idea that’s more developed from Katrina Flores:

Innovative Multicultural Initiatives Campaign

Goals:

1. Support and actively work on expanding MLC floors across campus.

2. Advocate and actively work on a financial model for no additional costs for living on an MLC floor.

3. Support and actively work toward expansion of the student run and initiated course: InterCultural Dialogues (ICD)

4. Actively work towards financial stability and institutionalization of ICD course in regard to course costs and an annually funded .5 Graduate PA

5. Support and create a Multicultural RSO network as an active innovative multicultural initiative generator

Sought Partners:

MCSC

House Fellows

MRC’s

Housing

WUD Committees

Diversity Committee

RSO’s actively supporting and initiating multicultural education programming