After plaguing the campus community for years, the contentious issue of the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate's culture representatives may be finally approaching resolution.
The new proposed TCU constitution released this week includes a compromise on the culture reps that has been called both surprising and amicable.
The proposal would replace the current culture representatives with a community representative system, which would open up the TCU representative system to any recognized student organization that has completed a standard petition of 250 signatures.
Community representatives will be allowed to vote on all Senate matters, except those that deal with the allocation of the Student Activities Fee.
Every four years the status of the community representative would be subject to re-approval by the student body, although the elections will be staggered to prevent all of them from coming under review at the same time. The particular representative for a given body will be selected on a yearly basis by the body itself.
Under this proposal, the Pan-African Alliance (PAA), the Asian Community at Tufts (ACT), the Association of Latin American Students (ALAS) and the Tufts Transgendered, Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Collective (TTLGBC) will retain their current representative status.
Sam Dangremond, chair of the Committee on Student Life has been an active participant in forming the proposal. "It's remarkable that we were able to stay the course" with the issue, Dangremond said, given the unprecedented amount of compromise required.
The process of shaping the proposal began in the middle of last semester after the failure of ThePrimary Source's bid for a conservative culture representative. Since then, there have been weekly meetings between members of ThePrimary Source, representatives of the culture groups, and TCU senators, with Alison Clarke acting as a mediator.
By all accounts, all parties are pleased with the resolution, Dangremond said.
Senior Aaron Chiu, who attended meetings and gave feedback and ideas on behalf of the Asian community at Tufts, said that the process was very open. He said that the meetings were open to everyone, and there was good attendance and diversity. "I think that it was a compromise, but one that surprised a lot of people."
Chiu said of that a great deal of hatred was brought to the surface last year over Amendment III, which, if it had been successful, would have removed culture reps from the Senate.
According to Chiu, this proposal stems from both those who support the culture representatives and don't want to see this kind of polarization again and from those who do not support culture representatives, but realize that they are not going to go away.
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