Senate tries to increase student outreach

Recent campus controversy regarding culture representatives on the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate and talk of revising the TCU constitution has drawn attention to the long-standing issue of insufficient Senate outreach to the general student population.

The issue of culture representatives is a "byproduct of a larger problem," namely that students do not know much about the Senate and therefore do not feel sufficiently represented, explained sophomore senator Chike Aguh.

For the average student, information on Senate is neither plentiful nor easily accessible. The Senate has a web page with a link on TuftsLife.com, and the Sunday Senate meetings are open to the public. But these means of communication with the student government require students to take a pro-active approach and have prior knowledge of where to seek out this information.

Some students are frustrated about the Senate's seeming opacity. "I can't support them if I don't know what they are doing," freshman Zack Gerber said. "How do I know if the Senate is representing my views or addressing my concerns if they never ask me?"

The student body is not simply uninformed about the Senate, but it is misinformed, according to junior senator Josh Belkin. "There are misconceptions about the Senate," Belkin said. "People don't know our role or how effective we are, and they can only perceive how well we are doing by what they know," and most of this information is gleaned from "hearsay, from the rumor mill, or what they read in the paper," he said.

This year, the Senate is taking the initiative to improve student outreach. One senate committee, the Culture, Ethnicity and Community Affairs (CECA) Committee, recently passed a new bylaw requiring its members to attend a culture-related organization's meetings.

The Senate's goal is to make itself more visible to students _ to hear their views and to inform them of how the Senate can work for them _ rather than ask the students to come to them with issues and concerns.

At last week's Senate meeting, TCU President Melissa Carson presented a request, similar to CECA's bylaw, to all senators. Carson asked each senator to voluntarily attend meetings of student organizations with the goal of having a senator at every meeting on campus.

"It's not a required, but a very encouraged option," Senate Historian Alison Clarke said. The feedback from the CECA initiative was so positive that it made sense to expand it to the entire Senate senate, Clark said, especially since the Senate has "historically struggled in outreach."

Many senators were supportive of Carson's proposal. "Many students have had ideas like this, and [Carson] has taken a very big step in starting the process," Public Relations (PR) Committee Chair Randy Newsom said. Senator attendance at student organizations' meetings would make "student outreach a commitment for the whole body," he said.

Members of the PR Committee hope that this step will improve outreach from every senator. They are also considering attendance by senators at hall snacks in every dorm to increase contact with students.

In addition, the Senate has created a form on their web page for students to anonymously voice their opinions and report issues and concerns. "We receive about ten to 12 entries a week, letting us know what students are concerned with and where we can improve," Belkin said.

Belkin has also proposed an alternative structure for the Senate, in which each senator would be accountable to and responsible for about 130 students. Senators would send out an e-mail introducing themselves to their student constituents and make themselves available for comment, Belkin said. The goal is to have people view the Senate as not "just a body, disconnected from the students," but for students to be able to say, "that's my senator, this is what I asked them to do, this is what they did for me."

Regular senators are required to log about one hour of "outreach" per week by holding office hours in the senate office. Other forms of outreach are encouraged, but not required.

Despite the recent concern over senate outreach, attempts to improve it have been ongoing for some time. Last year, former Senator Pritesh Gandhi helped pass a set of bylaws that required an extended open forum at the beginning of alternate Senate meetings. The bylaws also required that senators gather feedback from students around campus during their office hours rather than spend the time in the Senate Office.

The bylaws also created two class collectives _ the first made up of the freshman and sophomore senators and the second of the junior and senior senators _ which would have met once a month. But the open forum before meetings was the only reform from the spring semester that has endured.