7:00 p.m. | Attendance
7:01 | Executive Report from Activities: Activities: “We have some organization certifications looming on the horizon. Next week you will see the Gentlemen’s Sandwich Club and the Listening Center among others.” Activities also announces that Director of Campus Activities Terry Quinn and Associate Dean of the College Raymon Parker will now be intermittently sitting in on VSA Activities Committee Meetings to “check in on how the VSA is spending our student activities fee,” says Activities.
Fund Applications:
7:10 | Finance moves to allocate $5000 from Council Discretionary to the Community Shuttle. According to Operations, student Shuttle usage has gone up by about 12 percent since last semester.
7:12 | Motion passes unanimously.
7:44 | Finance moves to allocate $9000 from the Speakers & Lectures Fund to the Black Students Union (BSU). If granted the money, the BSU will host the Black Conference on April 23, which will feature music and lecturers and will focus mostly on black sexuality and black women, explains a representative from the BSU. Motion passes unanimously.
7:48 | Finance moves to allocate $2500 from the Conference Fund to the African Students Union. Motion passes unanimously.
7:49 | Finance moves to allocate $800 from the Conference Fund to the Polo Team. A representative from the team explains that the money would go toward the entry fee for the regional Polo competition, for which the Vassar team qualified following recent victories over Yale and Harvard Universities. Motion passes unanimously.
Open Discussion:
8:02 | 2011 asks Academics about the recent cancellation of Vassar’s five summer study abroad programs, explaining that he agreed strongly with the Miscellany News 1.28.10 Staff Editorial, saying that administrators should have sent an all-campus e-mail informing the entire community of this decision. Academics explains that as she understands it, the senior officers involved in making the decision “wanted department chairs to be the ones to inform their students about it.”
8:12 | Noyes: “The College seems to insist that the only people who care about a department are the majors within that department. We go to a liberal arts college, and the point is that everyone wants to explore different departments. Just because I’m not taking a class in the Italian Department doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the Italian Department … this is not the first time this has happened.”
8:18 | Strong, who is a student representative on the Committee on Curricular Policies (CCP), expressed frustration that she did not know about the cancellation earlier and that the decision did not go through CCP, as nearly all academic-based decisions typically do.
8:23 | President: “I do think that it’s really important that this Council be in support of experiential learning. Perhaps in the coming weeks we can draft a resolution in support of this.”
8:32 | Council adjourned.
