Former Tufts Community Union (TCU) President Neil DiBiase and two other seniors won positions Sunday as this year's TCU Senate trustee representatives.
DiBiase will represent students on the Board of Trustees' Committee for University Advancement, Laura Herman will work with the board's Administration and Finance Committee and Jen Bailey will be the liaison to the board's Academic Affairs Committee.
The elections were open to all interested students, but voting for the three trustee representatives was internal, with only senators casting votes.
The representatives do not vote on Senate matters, but they attend Senate meetings to stay attuned to student issues. They cannot vote on board matters either; they instead provide trustees with information and suggestions.
"Ultimately, they're all in it to represent us and take our concerns to the trustees," said TCU Historian Antonella Scarano, a senior.
DiBiase believes that the central role of the student representatives is to keep trustees informed about students' view of the university, bridging the gap between the campus and the boardroom.
"A lot of trustees don't have an opportunity to interact with students, so we try to give a good picture of what life is like on campus," he said.
Their efforts culminate in a February meeting of the Board of Trustees, at which the student representatives make presentations to their respective committees. Often, student representatives propose specific projects that they have devised.
DiBiase said that he will be examining the possible repercussions on students of Tufts' recently adopted practice of need-blind admissions, and he may encourage the trustees to subsidize events or grant some level of financial support to less affluent students.
"I want to ensure that as we continue to diversify socioeconomically as a school, student life isn't impacted and there isn't an informal stratification of students socioeconomically at Tufts," DiBiase said. "Where $10 for a cultural event might not be a big deal for some students, as we become more socioeconomically diverse, it might become a bigger deal for other students."
Bailey will be focusing her efforts on how to best foster a stronger sense of community at Tufts, an endeavor that will involve both speaking to students directly and combing through data from student surveys like the Senate's annual senior exit survey and sophomore survey.
"One issue that I hear repeatedly from recent alumni and even students here is that they feel connected to their friends and student organizations, but when it comes to feeling connected to Tufts as a whole, that universal community doesn't exist for them," Bailey said. "I'd like to look at questions that have already been asked about community and see where the gaps really lie in our programming."
Herman, who covered the Senate as a writer for the Daily during her freshman year, said that projects such as construction and renovation impact student life strongly. In particular, Herman mentioned updating the campus center, which she said lags behind other facilities on campus, as a possible goal.
"I think the current state of the campus center is pretty bad and needs a lot of work, and it's something that is at the heart of student life on campus," Herman said. "It's the first thing people visit when they come as prospective students. I don't think the building is on par with the rest of the university, the way we present ourselves."
