Columbia College’s own smoky back room

CCSC met last night, just as it does every Sunday. Pinch-hitter Conor Skelding sat in front.

Yesterday night’s was a pleasantly and surprisingly short CCSC meeting (only about 45 minutes!).

First off, class councils and senators gave their updates. Ryan Mandelbaum of 2013 boasted that Lerner Pub had went really well, and that they had planned “four events in four weeks” of which “two were pretty awesome.” Conan Cassidy bragged about bagels. Loxley Bennett explained that 2015’s council was “still getting our stuff together.”

Eduardo Santana, one of CC’s senators, talked about going to last Friday’s Global Strategies Initiative at Faculty House that brought together all the directors of Columbia’s Global Centers. Maybe there are some opportunities for undergrads there? (What is a global center, anyway?) Eduardo said Faculty House food was really good, though, and that the Executive VP for Global Centers cared about students.

After updates, Daphne Chen and Will Hughes presented two resolutions for new funds. First they came the Travel Fund, which Daphne explained was a way for groups who qualified for, say, a national competition to apply for up to $8,000 to go compete (since the trip wouldn’t have been considered in their annual allocation). Next came the Capital Investment Fund, which is up to $15,000 a given group to buy expensive items that will last a few years and cannot be planned for in a club allocation, like a tuba for the band.  Both passed unanimously, to self-congratulatory snaps and council-members ironically stage-whispering,”We did something! We did something!”

Next, Karishma introduced their plan to put underutilized spaces to use. We’re talking spaces like the Wien basement which not only exists, but has a kitchen, though—and this is Karishma gold, here—“Is it up to code? No, obviously not.” So Karishma and some other council members are going to identify underutilized spaces (ex. Ruggles, River, and Woodbridge basements; Wien lounge; Kent attic; Schapiro dance rooms), tour them with Scott Wright, have a lot of town halls on how to use them, and then submit a proposal on how to use them to Wright. This is a semester-long project, but Karishma says they’ll have toured the spaces and taken  pictures and notes on each by next meeting. According to Karishma: “Great. So now you know. That is a thing we are doing. It’s going to be really great.”

Miscellaneous: the Student Wellness Project is applying for a brownstone. Mandebaum also said that they’d (the SWP) also considered setting aside a room in Butler for pleasure reading (Does this make any sense? Would pleasure reading be enforced? Would people ever go to Butler to read for pleasure? Do people read for pleasure?). Somebody also suggested moving the package center  to points unknown and putting student space there instead. Phil Chambers wants to put a rock climbing wall somewhere (actually).

Lastly, Yanyi talked about  her “Post-Event Review Forms,” optional worksheets she made to help clubs organize and document their events. They’d be two part, one part pre- and one part post-event. In a non-binding show of hands, council members supported making PERFs mandatory for themselves. They floated creating a searchable event review database.

That was it for official business. Karishma spent a few minutes reminding/haranguing CCSC members into coming to retreat, which she said is good for getting to know one another and also for talking big-picture visiony stuff for the year. It’s  next weekend, and they’ve known about it “since week one,” and—get this—if a council member had committed to going but bails, CCSC gets docked the money directly, which means we get docked the money directly via the Student Life Fee. So go to retreat, student leaders!

As Karishma said (to even more more fervent snaps):  “Until we have community in this council, we cannot start building community at Columbia.”