this is a recycled image from a previous CCSC post

ESC talked about Community Guidelines, goals for the year, and more at last night’s meeting.

After 2019 President Izzet Kebudi gave a quick update on “Lerner Central”—the “study-free zones” (one and a half years in the making) which now take up the space formerly occupied by the East and West Ramp rooms—the Engineering Student Council ran a relatively brief meeting to finish up all of the discussions they had this past weekend during the student council retreat.

The first discussion related to ESC’s “Community Guidelines”—or, more simply, a list of rules for ESC conduct and behavior. The nine rules formulated this week, which are relayed simply below, are:

1. ESC uses Robert’s Rules of Order, modified to allow primarily for points of inquiry, direct responses, a speakers’ list, and simple motions
2. There is a timer for responses
3. Each individual is limited on the number of times he or she can speak on a speakers’ list
4. Use “I” statements when not referring to student-wide opinion or rationale
5. Don’t say extraneous things in discussions
6. Read all documents before meetings
7. Elaborate on all acronyms used during meetings
8. The ESC GroupMe is “casual,” but nobody can mute it
9. Keep updates as brief as possible

One more was added to this list of guidelines at the meeting:

10. Be respectful and try to understand where people are coming from

The second major portion of the meeting related to ESC’s list of goals for the year. Like the Community Guidelines, these were also completed in the main at the retreat. The goals for the year include:

1. Faculty training, as ESC doesn’t believe faculty are sensitive enough to students
2. Creating a finance video series to explain to student groups all the way they can get funding
3. Adding questions to course evaluations regarding how sensitive faculty are to student feelings
4. Updating how Columbia allows SEAS students to register to allow for students to more safely get on waitlists for important courses and normalize student registration across all schools
5. Creating an advising survey
6. Renaming “study breaks” because ESC doesn’t want to imply that you should otherwise normally be studying
7. Evaluating CPS triage calls to make them more efficient
8. Using class council money in more efficient ways to foster inclusivity

Finally, ESC ended upon a discussion regarding CC and SEAS’ new programming board. F@CU, when budgets and funding are finalized across the school, increased a portion of student tuition in the hopes of putting it towards a programming board—a new committee which would plan and execute school traditions and celebrations. This Columbia party planning committee is based off similar groups at other schools, such as Barnard’s McAC which “[does] that big sandwich event.”

The discussion centered around what to do with the already allocated money—whether to use it as intended and put it towards a joint CC-SEAS programming board, take back the SEAS portion and create only a SEAS programming board, or to do something else with it. Executive VP Asher Goldfinger argued for spending the money only on SEAS, claiming “whenever events are thrown school-wide, the tendency I’ve seen is that SEAS kids don’t show up.” Members of the Class of 2017 argued against this, saying that “it’s more cohesive” to have joint events, not creating “weird division.” 2019 President Izzet Kebudi agreed, referring to how CC and SEAS students live together and to the increased enthusiasm for events when SEAS students can go with their CC friends (or vice versa).

Of course, the programming board funding up for debate (perhaps $40,000 total) was distributed for a single function to be executed jointly by CC and SEAS, meaning that taking back this money could seem ill-mannered. At best, taking back or redirecting this allocated money would be based in an interpretation of how an elected ESC official is to serve his or her electorate—a possibly controversial interpretation, if it moves against how ESC and CCSC agreed to allocate money during F@CU.

Without coming to a solid conclusion, ESC ended upon this tense discussion.

Rules of Order via Bwog Archives