Tufts Community Union senators plan to deliberate on their last six resolutions of the school year during this Sunday's meeting.
One resolution deals with student input on the Task Force on Freedom of Expression, another suggests improving dormitory common rooms, a third lobbies for extending the fall reading period, and the final resolution seeks to resolve the recent disagreements between the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and the Board of Trustees.
Sophomore Xavier Malina, a senator who co-chairs the Senate's Administration and Policy Committee, plans to submit two more resolutions before the meeting. The first will suggest that the administration look into implementing universal fob access to dormitories. The second will call for a technical change to the Senate's constitution.
If passed, the non-binding resolutions will serve as policy recommendations to administrators and other relevant parties.
Senator Elton Sykes, a junior, and freshman Ryan Heman, the community representative for the Queer Straight Alliance, submitted a resolution last night lobbying the Task Force on Freedom of Expression to consider student views on free speech in its development of a policy recommendation.
"We're hoping that our recommendations will be in that report to provide a student perspective," Sykes said. "Right now they're not really getting students; they're getting faculty."
Heman and Sykes think that their resolution will receive some debate because it has to do with the controversial subject of free speech. "We're expecting the other senators will have a lot of input on it," Heman said. "But I don't think anyone's inherently against what we're looking for here."
The resolution's recommendations are based on the findings of a survey conducted by the Senate Committee on Community Values, which Sykes chairs. The survey asked students to define free expression, among other things.
University President Lawrence Bacow established a Task Force on Freedom of Expression in January. The president has assembled a team of exclusively faculty and staff members to draft a suggested official university policy on free speech.
Senator Chas Morrison, a freshman, has submitted his own resolution, which advocates for the improvement of residence hall common rooms.
Among the proposed legislation's suggestions are combining the Department of Facilities and the Office of Residential Life and Learning, hiring an interior designer to work on the aesthetics of common rooms and increasing the amount of student involvement in renovations and other projects, Morrison said.
The proposed legislation is meant to build on recommendations from a report written by freshman Shabazz Stuart, a founder of Tufts Students for the Improvement of Residential Life and Community.
"My resolution is basically encouraging the administration to adopt the recommendations of that report and implement it fully," Morrison said.
On March 7, senators and students from Stuart's group visited other schools in the Boston area, including Harvard, Northeastern and Boston Universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to Morrison.
"They basically went around, saw what these schools were doing well in these common rooms - things they were doing differently from Tufts - and they just wanted to see how the common areas contributed generally to the atmosphere," Morrison said.
A third resolution, submitted by Senator Samia Zahran, a freshman, supports adding an extra day to the fall semester reading period. It currently lasts two days while the spring's lasts three.
"I originally thought the [fall] reading period lasted three days, but it's only three days in the spring," Zahran told the Daily last month. "I wondered why we didn't have three days in the fall."
The proposal has the support of Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser, but there might be some inherent problems with moving forward, Zahran said.
"Extending the fall reading period by one day ... conflicts with scheduling a little bit, so typically that would keep us here for an extra day before winter break," she said.
Zahran said that even though lengthening the period every year might be impossible, having the Senate's backing would send a strong message to those involved with scheduling. "Faculty members vote on the scheduling, so if we had a resolution we could take it to the faculty members," Zahran said.
A final resolution will address the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and its recent conflicts with the administration and the Board of Trustees.
Committee members believe that the Board has gone back on its word in recently decreasing the size of the group. Board members say they have always been clear that the committee would have to be small and would not be allowed to contain non-undergraduates.
Sophomore Gabe Frumkin, who chairs the committee and submitted the resolution, hopes action from the Senate supporting the committee's original goals will help the committee's cause.
"We understand that the Board of Trustees and the administration take resolutions very seriously," Frumkin said.
The committee's primary aim is to encourage responsible investment practices by preventing the university from supporting companies that mishandle global issues such as climate change or the crisis in Darfur, according to Frumkin.
"We resolve that we want to see the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility expanded, and we want it resolved that [the Board of Trustees should] work with us more and give us more reports in endowment transparency," Frumkin said.
Malina, who has been working on extending fob access for undergraduates, will propose a resolution on giving all students the ability to enter every dormitory with their fob devices. His legislation will ask the administration to consider allowing universal access, he said.
"The resolution is just going to ask the administration to ... support looking into the universal fob option," he said. He hopes that "if it's deemed by public safety and the administration involved [that] all the security issues are resolved," then it will be implemented on a step-by-step basis. This will most likely involve first giving every freshman access to all-freshman dorms, Malina added.
In another resolution, Malina plans to change the role of the Senate historian in determining whether senators' absences from meetings are unexcused.
After an amendment to the body's constitution last year, he said, such decisions were transferred from the entire Senate executive board to solely the historian, putting added pressure on that officer.
Molina said his resolution will suggest bringing the entire executive board back into that decision-making process.
