The Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate passed new bylaws during its retreat this weekend after one senator, sophomore Pritesh Gandhi, threatened to quit the body and form a rival student government if the proposals did not pass.
Gandhi, who spearheaded the changes in order to further connect senators with the student body, made his announcement at a senate meeting earlier this month. He was "pleasantly surprised" this weekend when senators voted overwhelmingly in support of the bylaws.
The new rules institute a biweekly senate open forum and "class collectives" - meetings intended to boost interaction among senators from the same year.
Gandhi proposed the changes because he was frustrated with the body as a freshman senator. "I felt [Senate was] detached, inefficient, and incapable of providing the leadership that a student organization should provide," he said. After this weekend, however, the senator's tone was noticeably more optimistic.
"It's a sign that Senate is going to make a lot of changes," he said yesterday.
Gandhi said his goal was to increase communication between senators, class leaders, and the entire student body. "It's going to encourage students to come out and talk," Gandhi said. "We're not an elitist group."
Senators should go door-to-door more often than the traditional run-through to obtain signatures needed to run for office, he said. "Right now, the senators don't talk about the student concerns that they go out and find," he said. "If they don't talk about it, then they aren't doing their job."
Senate president Eric Greenberg, vice president Melissa Carson, treasurer Ben Lee, and assistant treasurer Nikhil Abraham all co-sponsored Gandhi's proposal.
In the past, the senate held open forums at the beginning of its meetings, which enabled students to voice their concerns. But few students took advantage of the opportunity.
As a result, senators have a "tendency to do projects they want to do" without considering the best interests of the student body, Carson said. "It's improving the Senate, adding to what we have by bringing connection back to the classes with class collectives and furthering outreach efforts," she said.
The collectives will meet once each month to increase networking between senators from the same year. Each class of senators will also meet once per semester with its corresponding Programming Board class council to discuss class-specific issues and events.
The extended open forums will meet every other week before Senate meetings. To collect information, senators will spend their office hours speaking to students in dorms, dining halls, or out on campus. The office hours of the president, vice-president, treasurer and Allocations Board officers will still be spent in the Senate office.
"It's an evolution of the process" to reach out to the community, parliamentarian Andrew Potts said, noting previous attempts to hold dorm meetings and keep question boxes in the campus center and dining halls as predecessors to the new bylaws.
But one senator, senior Bill McCarthy, raised concerns about the necessity of class councils, saying the collectives will likely serve little purpose. And Potts, who said he generally supports the bylaws, admitted he was concerned that the Senate may be attempting too many reforms at the same time.
"I would like to have seen the reforms done as a trial period and then lead to an automatic vote, just because of the nature of how much it fundamentally changes what we do," Potts said.
He said that if a few reforms were implemented over time, the body would find it easier to fix problems.
"If I personally feel like the Senate is getting bogged down in these changes and hindering our ability to do our job, I won't hesitate to propose an amendment to kill them," he said. "It's not a personal attack, but it's my job to make sure Senate is running smoothly."
