The Tufts Community Union Senate met on Sunday to discuss recent and upcoming events, recap its Dining Survey initiative and hear the final Allocations Board requests of the semester, including an appeal for funding from the Tufts Solar Vehicle Project.
TCU Historian Defne Olgun, a junior, opened by promoting the Student Leadership Gala, which will be held on April 12 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. An annual event, the gala honors leaders of student organizations and clubs at Tufts.
TCU Services Committee Chair Shefali Bakre, a sophomore, then gave a summary of the April 3 farmers market hosted on the first Jumbo Day for prospective students. Bakre described the event as a huge success and said that vendors ran out of food entirely.
TCU Administration and Policy Committee Chair Spencer Kluger, a sophomore, then presented the findings of their Rate Your Meal feedback form on behalf of Hailey Renick, a first-year, who led the project. Advertised through QR codes in Dewick-MacPhie and Fresh at Carmichael Dining Centers, the form ran from Jan. 26 to Feb. 6 and saw more than 1,300 responses from 420 unique individuals.
Using metrics like satisfaction, freshness, temperature and flavor to rate meals, the survey found above-average overall satisfaction with Tufts Dining, with Fresh at Carmichael trending slightly higher than the Dewick on most metrics.
Kluger noted potential improvements and expressed plans to institutionalize the survey as a semesterly event.
“We want to create [an] even better survey design and have it with synchronized recipe inputs so we get even cleaner findings,” Kluger said. “We thought it had a lot of impact already, and we’re really happy with how it ran, but there’s definitely room for some improvements that we’re excited to make.”
The Senate’s ultimate vision is a program that facilitates the continual improvement of Tufts Dining.
“Theoretically, three years from now, for example, you go into the dining hall, every dish is pretty good and meets your expectations,” Kluger said. “That’s the goal with this; just getting better and better always.”
TCU President Dhruv Sampat, a senior, then updated the Senate on a variety of topics before leading a brainstorming session on ways to make the Senate’s communications with administration more structured.
“There are years where Senate works very closely with the administration, like this year. And there are years where we don’t work very closely with the administration, because it depends on leadership on both fronts,” Sampat said. “We’ve been asked to try and come up with a way that we can sort of institutionalize [how] we will interact with certain administrators.”
While Kluger pointed out that there may not always be updates that are relevant for the Senate to bring to administrators’ attention, Sampat argued that for many administrators, interaction with the Senate is their only contact with the student body.
“A lot of [administrators], especially Facilities and other such departments, they don’t have student workers, and they’re not interacting with students,” Sampat said. “They have no formal sort of interaction with any student. When we reach out to them, they learn things for the first time.”
Sampat then addressed the upcoming reelection cycle. He acknowledged issues of low voter turnout and discussed potential ways to improve involvement.
“We’ve seen very varying levels of interaction with these elections, and also, a lot of the seats are uncontested this year, which means that people just don’t have the incentive to vote, which we don’t want to see.”
Sampat also announced that the Senate’s internal elections will be held at 12 p.m. on April 26.
The Senate then reviewed several funding requests from student organizations and approved the final amounts recommended by the Allocations Board. The body also heard one appeal for funding from the Tufts Solar Vehicle Project.
Tufts Solar Vehicle Project initially requested $21,300 to transport its car to and compete in a tournament in Minnesota. Its proposal had been denied by the Allocations Board due to multiple factors including the club’s short lifespan, large amounts of supplemental funding it had already received and the inefficiency of spending such a large sum for just 10 members of the club.
The Solar Vehicle Project appealed to the Senate for a reduced sum of $9,700 to send members to watch the competition, rather than compete in it, citing the benefits of hands-on experience and networking.
The organization was ultimately awarded a reduced sum of $5,820 in a 12-11-0 vote.
