Tree lighting ceremony!! Exciting!

ESC specialist Finn Klauber went back to ESC for another one of their meetings. Here is his recap: 

Engineering Student Council met for a mercifully short session last night in the hopes of conserving midterm study time. An ad hoc discussion topic bookended a short roundup of updates.

Losing Track of Bias
An email sent out by the SEAS administration this weekend marked the beginning of SEAS implicit bias workshops—trainings which are supposed to raise awareness for implicit bias and promote inclusivity in the SEAS community. These trainings would only be attended by “people who oversee students” such as professors and TAs. As the email asked that SEAS students input their ideas for these trainings at a college wide discussion, ESC decided to briefly discuss anything which could be integrated into the event.

VP Communications Asher Goldfinger opened the discussion by saying that he “thinks CC has become pretty good for [sensitivity]” but that income bias is still relevant in SEAS. Specifically, he brought up an instance where a professor assumed his students would be able to purchase expensive equipment, positing that this is an example of implicit bias in the engineering classroom.

Most of the discussants contributed to the topic in a similar manner—by relating an anecdote about bias in the classroom. However, what began as anecdotes of sexism or class bias quickly lost relevance to the general discussion about implicit biases. Stories of professors explicitly targeting students, either positively or negatively, entered the discussion, along with more general gripes about accents and professors’ academic expectations. While these are no doubt of importance, it seemed that ESC slowly deviated from solely discussing implicit biases.

General Updates

  • President Ria Garg met with the Committee on Instruction to discuss course registration. Perhaps ESC’s long saga for registration justice will come to an end by next semester, as both the Committee and Paul Blaer recognized how the current system harms CS majors and minors. President Garg will also discuss this with Dean Morrison this week.
  • Tree Lighting 2018 is going to take place on Thursday, November 29th from 5:00 to 7:30. CCSC has ordered the long sleeve shirts while the remaining councils are splitting up the costs for food, drinks, and other giveaways.
  • University Senator Zoha Qamar will be meting with CU Health this week to review vending machine data. Let’s hope she brings back some fun facts about the vending machines here.
  • The Campus Affairs representative briefly mentioned how group fitness classes at Columbia are not free, which is something she would like to change. She also briefly brought up how Barnard can use Dodge but Columbia can not use the Barnard gym, although she admits this is a more complicated discussion given Barnard’s character.

Photo via Bwog archives