Editor’s Note: Kunal Botla is a former chair of the Daily’s editorial board. Botla was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.
On Sunday, the Tufts Community Union Senate voted on its new attendance policy, discussed bylaw changes to increase student body input in Senate resolutions and heard funding requests from eight student organizations.
TCU President Dhruv Sampat, a senior, introduced a revision to the new attendance policy presented at the Senate’s Sept. 14 meeting.
The new attendance policy reduced the percentage of required meetings from 85% to 82%. The revision also created a distinction for absences due to religious reasons, removing them from the count of absences for each senator. Sampat held office hours over the past week to address concerns raised by TCU senators after the policy was introduced.
“For a senator with minimal commitment — so just being on a committee and being on the full bodies or attending these meetings — that would mean that [they would] have to attend 32 meetings this year,” Sampat said. “18% of that should be about six and a half, seven meetings … across [TCU Senators’] committee meetings and this body … which is much more lenient than what we had last year.”
Senate full body meetings and Allocations Board meetings are now the only meetings that will not allow a virtual attendance option. The new attendance policy passed 27–0–1, with one abstention.
The Senate also reviewed changes to its bylaws, including allowing the attendance policy to be changed on a year-to-year basis.
If approved, the new Senate bylaws would no longer require the TCU President and Parliamentarian to hold a minimum of one weekly office hour, as these office hours were often underutilized in the past. However, a TCU senator suggested adding an amendment that would require the TCU President to hold office hours upon request.
TCU Senator Kunal Botla spoke about the accessibility of the Senate to the student body in comparison with the accessibility of the Tufts administration to the Senate.
“It’s slightly ironic that we’re asking the university president and administration to make themselves more available and host office hours, but then we’re removing the requirement,” Botla said.
The Senate executive board also introduced provisions to their bylaws to include that full senate meeting agendas be available to the student body upon request. In addition, if approved by Senate, the bylaw revisions would include a provision allowing the Executive Board to instruct authors of resolutions to introduce them as referenda to the student body. This action would require approval by a majority of the Executive Board.
Sampat noted that the change in Senate policy on resolutions would allow for more input from the student body and make Senate action less “performative.”
“If someone brings up a resolution of trying to solve or trying to do something that is directly in our control … that’s something that we should definitely hear, and that’s something we should decide as a body to pursue or to not pursue,” Sampat said. “What has happened, though, in the previous few years of the Senate is that every single resolution that comes through Senate is just said ‘yes’ to because there’s nothing binding that says that we have to help the authors actually achieve what is set in that resolution.”
Sampat highlighted the importance of referenda as ways of gathering student body feedback, particularly on political resolutions.
“As representative as this body is, we cannot possibly represent the political views of 6,800 people, and therefore it’s somehow just very ineffective in being a tool of detecting how students on this campus feel, which is where [referenda] come in,” Sampat said.
Botla raised a question about how the Senate decides which resolutions to send to a referendum for the student body.
“There are a lot of political things that we engage with that aren’t as heavy as some of the other topics we’ve engaged with. And where is that line drawn? Is that just up to Execs to determine, or is it the Senate that decides what the political line of relevance is for this voting?” Botla said.
Finally, Senate considered funding requests recommended by the Allocations Board for budgeting from eight student organizations: Tufts Historical Review, Tufts Roundnet, Tufts Hemispheres Magazine, Tufts University Television, American Society of Civil Engineers, Tufts Law Review and Indigenous Students Organization at Tufts. Allocations Board representatives explained appeals on behalf of ASCE, Tufts Law Review and ISOT, who did not send in club members.
The budget requests from Hemispheres and ISOT were approved in full by TCU. Historical Review, Roundnet and ASCE received approval for compromised versions of their proposed budget appeals. TUTV’s supplementary funding request was denied by the Senate.
