On Thursday, November 6, SGA had its weekly meeting in the Zachs Hillel House. In the first part of the meeting, the Director Smith was there to answer questions from students and listened to their comments and concerns. He re-emphasized the safety tips that were included in an email that Dean Arcelus sent out a couple of weeks ago, one of which was a reminder for students to lock their doors. He also mentioned how there has been a rising issue of vandalism in some parts of campus, and students should do their best to prevent these incidents from happening.
Next, assembly members continued to talk about the issue of vandalism on campus and mentioned some of the recent incidents occurring on campus. One of these recent incidents included the Lazrus fire alarm allegedly going off at 2:00 a.m. because an off-campus student used the oven to bake cookies and then left before they were finished cooking.
After the student discussion about vandalism, the meeting moved to open forum where representatives from Launch, Conn’s new entrepreneurship club, introduced and explained the nature of the club, petitioning to achieve official ASO status and receive funds from the SGA. Launch was granted ASO status at the following meeting.
As the next issue, one SGA assembly member addressed that the Uniflow printing system has been giving faculty members and students difficulty and that one of the organizations on campus is planning to revamp the system and fix some of the problems that are occurring.
Members also brought up the problem of the Health Center’s limited hours of operation. Many House Senators expressed both their personal support and their dorms’ support of trying to extend the hours. It was unclear, at this meeting, what SGA’s next step regarding this issue will be; however, it seems as if this topic will be looked at more in the near future.
Thursday’s SGA meeting ended with a 45-minute forum surrounding the topic of bar culture on campus. The most widely discussed issue was that many students are going to off-campus bars on Thursdays and Saturdays instead of staying on campus. Many argued that this is not only bad for student involvement with activities happening on campus, but it is also a serious safety issue.
In order to try to combat this problem, assembly members brought up the idea of utilizing the common rooms for more activities since most of the time on Thursday and Friday nights nobody is using them. The SGA assembly members expressed that they will continue to focus on this recurring issue and work with SAC and other clubs and organizations to try to come up with a variety of activities for students to participate in on Thursday and Saturday nights. •
