On Tuesday night, three of the Student Government committees — finance, oversight and advocacy and rules and judiciary — met to discuss plans for the spring semester.
Sarah Hudak, chairperson of the oversight and advocacy committee, explained the Graduate and Professional Student Federation’s split from student government.
“Obviously, unless you’ve heard, but faculty did get involved and decided to split the two,” she said. “As far as what this means, we don’t really know yet because the details are still being worked out.”
She said student government and GPSF need to revisit the student code and decide how the split will work.
“There’s still a ton to work out,” she said. “Obviously, we’re going to have to go back through the code, work on compromises, see where we’re still going to be together.”
After informing the committee of the split, Hudak said Student Congress needed to prioritize four select committees — academics, health, campus climate and campus development.
“We need to get these select committees going,” she said. “The fact that they haven’t met yet — and I don’t blame the chairs at all, it’s not your fault, you were given no information — that’s leadership’s fault and we apologize for that.”
Ben Albert, chairperson of the finance committee, introduced a bill proposal to both the rules and judiciary committee and the finance committee. He addressed the rules and judiciary committee first.
“Basically, this changes the way that we do funding,” he said. “As you can see in the ‘whereas’ sections, the funding system is just broken, like in fall we received 200 requests and with the first-come, first-serve method that we have historically used, we were only able to fund 60 of those requests and that wasn’t even funding them in full and I thought we were being pretty frugal the entire semester.”
