En plein air, just like student groups!

CCSC holds weekly meetings. Brian Wagner attended one of them last night. This is what he saw.

• The meeting opened with a discussion of a new committee. Bureaucracy!  The special committee would tackle co-sponsorship requests. At present, groups requesting co-sponsorships from the different student councils schlep to four different meetings to present their case. If a new committee were created, it would allow for a more efficient process carried out by a single body. Some groups have purportedly been gaming the current system by telling individual student councils that they requested less from the other councils than they actually had in an effort to convince the duped councils to give more (Bwog calls shenanigans!). However, some feared a loss of control by each of the individual councils, and a potential influx of co-sponsorship requests. Plus, the CCSC Constitution would have to be amended to allow for the change (Hopefully quills would be involved). One council member wanted to know if this “would be like how Columbia went to the Common App?” In the end, the council took no further action and is waiting to see how the other councils feel before moving on.
• The council only discussed one resolution last night. The resolution would make student group events scheduled outdoors known to the public ahead of time. Following last semester’s Israeli border simulation on Low Plaza, opposed groups were upset that they had not known of the demonstration until it was already happening and were then unable to organize a sort of counter-protest. Events scheduled indoors are visible online in advance, but the same doesn’t apply to events scheduled to be held outside. The council discussed making it easier to reserve outdoor spaces online, reducing the headache imposed on student groups. As Learned summarized in a fit of tongue-tripping, “This makes them visible, it doesn’t makes them book.” The council passed the resolution without making any changes.
• A speaker from the Global China Connection gave a brief presentation; the group is looking to introduce the Chinese students who will be coming to America in February to collegiate student leaders. They thought it would be cool for the students to meet CCSC and see how we do stuff here, and CCSC thought so too.
• Finally, the council took on the Course Evaluation Overhaul plan. The idea is to make the Courseworks evaluations that we all suffer through when we should be studying for finals visible to the public. If you’re a well-informed Columbia citizen, you’ll remember that the council passed a resolution on this last semester. The council will now gauge the interest of individual departments in the change. More progress should be made on this soon, that is as long as no non-tenured professors go postal on the innocent little CCSCers who visit them.