Editor’s Note: Ari Osakwe is an assistant editor for the news section of the Daily. He was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.
The TCU Senate held internal elections for this year’s slate of trustee representatives on Sunday. These non-voting members will represent the student body in meetings of the Tufts University Board of Trustees and are expected to attend half the Senate’s meetings over the semester. They will represent three aspects of campus life: university advancement, student affairs and academic affairs.
Sophomore Arinze Osakwe will be the new trustee representative for university advancement.
“I worked with Tufts Admissions last summer, and from there I did lots of marketing and advertising and really showed the best of Tufts to different prospective students,” Osakwe said in a speech to the Senate. “During that time, I really just thought I would love to do something similar, but with ideas and the opinions of students that could actually be brought forward to the Board of Trustees, or really any other board here at Tufts.”
Margaret Hines, meanwhile, will be the new trustee representative for academic affairs.
The Board of Trustees requested that senior Seray Ajei retain her position as trustee representative for student affairs. Returning to the position may complicate Ajei’s potential bid for Senate this semester, though nothing in the TCU Senate bylaws prevents the two positions from being held simultaneously.
TCU Senate President Brendan French and Vice President Shefali Bakre told the Senate about their upcoming meeting with University President Sunil Kumar and Deans Bárbara Brizuela and Kyongbum Lee, among a number of other members of the university’s administration.
On the docket will be a range of issues, including staffing levels at the eight Division of Student Diversity and Inclusion centers on campus, recent criticisms and protests surrounding the Office of Equal Opportunity and the status of the Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College of Civic Life.
The administration has seen protests over its decision to suspend TUPIT’s on-campus classes for the academic year following a shooting involving a former participant, and its perceived lack of support for the program after replacing its founder and former executive director Hilary Binda over the summer.
Other updates included a rejection of a proposed bylaw amendment to make the TCU Senate Executive Board “mandatory reporters” of incidents to the university administration, a faculty meet and greet on Oct. 14 and a walkthrough of the Treasury’s new online reimbursement platform.
The Senate committee chairs selected their members last week and announced their decisions to the Senate on Sunday.
Naisha Luthra, international community senator and a member of the Committee for Community and Diversity, spoke about the committees’ goals for the upcoming year.
“We’re definitely a smaller group, but I think we’re going to work on trying to reach out to our communities and try to find more people interested in filling these roles,” Luthra said. “A big focus of CCDI [will be] to fill up positions and do more outreach with the DSDI centers and just work more closely with the institution.”
