This week, Senate released Top 40 results, made a final decision on student space allocations, and deliberated over student opportunity subsidies.
In committee reports this week, Student Body President Danielle Jucal ‘14 stated that Senate is working on bringing cigarette butt receptacles back to campus, and relayed the Krogerian announcement of three new academic majors at Reed: Dance, Comparative Literature, and Computer Science. The “creation” of Comparative Literature is a misnomer, as the administration and faculty have merely chosen to replace General Literature with Comparative Literature. President Juncal expects the dance major to come into being next year.
After the presentation of Top 40 results ($420.69, $696.96) Senate voted to move the MLLL—the comic book reading room, for those of you who haven’t checked it out yet—into the Blue Heron Infoshop (BHI), and the Infoshop into the Ping Pong Room (PPR). This move will triple the MLLL’s square footage and enlarge the Infoshop as well. Student Body Vice President Rennie Meyers ‘14 projected that the move would be completed by the second week of spring semester. “The signators of the spaces are going to be in charge. We are consulting with them on budget, design, sourcing, etcetera” Meyers said. Alejandro Chavez ‘15 asked if the MLLL had a plan to constrain growth as to avoid growing out of the Infoshop, Meyers relayed that Senate is interested in creating space for graphic novels in the library stacks.
Senate then turned their attention to the Student Opportunity Subsidies—a consistent topic of discussion the last few weeks. Student Opportunity Subsidies are a sort of annual mini grant that Senate can use to fund important projects and are funded with revenue generated by the Endowment for Student Autonomy. There was much back-and-forth over which of the three proposals previously discussed—creating summer grants to fund unpaid internships, creating stipends to augment student body wages for students in financial need, and instituting system to fund capital improvements to student spaces (e.g. KRRC)—will be the first SOS.
Senate was divided as to which SOS to support this year. “I’ve come to the conclusion that SB stipends are more important [than summer internship money]” Eileen Vinton ‘15 said, emphasizing that such student body stipends would encourage greater socioeconomic diversity in student body leadership positions. Dwayne Okpaise ‘14 concurred, although he voiced a concern that additional funds would not necessarily encourage more low-SES students to apply, saying “I haven’t talked to people who have said ‘I would totally run if it paid more’” and called for student input into the process. Kieran Hanrahran ‘14 proposed leaving up the decision to the student body at large via referendum, but added he thought “the SB position [subsidy] is a no brainer,” and proposed implementing the subsidies through wage review.
Meyers’s concerns centered around the institutional burden imposed on the Senate by the SOS program and proposed choosing summer internship grants, noting that the mechanism for determining student financial need would be the same for both the summer internship and student body position stipend SOSs and internship stipends would be a good “test run” for SOS. Senator Kate Hilts agreed in part, concerned that implementing SB position stipends would “involve a lot of educating the student body,” but that the internship stipends ultimately “aren’t as important as the SB stipends.”
No matter Senate’s inclination, they have to move fast to avoid being locked out of SB stipends for the spring semester; although bureaucratic challenges associated with distributing wage stipends could very well make their implementation this year impossible.