News-Letter

Media Credit: Conor Kevit A vote in favor of re-vamping StuCo relations with administrators passed easily.

The Student Council passed a strongly worded resolution Tuesday that calls for a complete overhaul of its relations with University administrators.

The resolution was passed with a nearly unanimous vote, criticizing administrators for impeding or ignoring a number of the Council's initiatives.

The resolution comes after a rocky start to the year, which included the senior class council having their funding frozen at one point last fall due to what Council President Scott Bierbryer termed "counter-productiveness" in an e-mail to the class presidents.

The resolution cites a number of failures in the administration's communication with the Council - including one which made it impossible for them to bring the rapper Ludacris to campus this weekend - along with numerous demands for improvements.

"I feel like none of these are unreasonable," he told the Council. "And most of these were actually recommended by the administration," he added, citing a report in 2002 by Paula Burger, dean of undergraduate education.

Although the administration had not been formally presented with the resolution by press time, Burger and Susan Boswell, dean of student life, said that they would be open to looking at a complete reformatting of the relationship between the administration and the Council.

"I think it's fair to say that relationships with Scott and some members of his executive staff are currently strained at best," Boswell said in an e-mail to the News-Letter.

The resolution points to a number of communication failures between the administration and the Council, including a lack of transparency, failure to provide students with sufficient advanced notice of policy changes, ignoring the representative input of the Council, and a failure to provide a system of governance that allows for undergraduates to impact decisions or enact change on campus.

Specifically, the Council was frustrated by the administration's decisions to change the academic course schedule, the study abroad programs, some Housing and Dining Services policies, internship credit policies, student group allocations and event planning policies. None of these, the Council said, was made with sufficient input from the student body.

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