![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
you remember that what i had to say on monday was 'grrrrarraraaaarrrrrgh'. i am now in a position to clarify.
the good news: i have been elected student president of common room for St Cross College, with effect from july 1.
the not-so-good news: our constitution and by-laws were rejected by the voters.
that's the short version. the long version is this:
Like all colleges, we have more than one sort of member; in our case, we don't have undergraduates, but we do obviously have students, or Junior Members, and we have fellows, or Senior Members. But we, in our aggressive informality, just have one common room -- so we just have one Common Room Committee, made up mainly of students elected by other students but also including the Bursar and Assistant Bursar (in a US-private-school model, think of the Master as the headmaster, the Bursar as the director of the school, and the Assistant Bursar as her deputy) and a president nominated from among the fellows by the Governing Body (which I believe is just a collection of all current fellows, but I could be wrong). That effectively makes the student president the vice president of CRC, so okay, whatever.
(Absolutely relevant side note: Queen P, our student president, found out at the end of May that he had won a very cushy scholarship at another college, so he promptly submitted his resignation effective June 30. After a bit of concern that one or both of two extremely ill-suited people would be nominated for the gig, I agreed to accept a nomination so people would have a non-evil option; and then it turned out that neither of those people was nominated, and another qualified person had been nominated without her knowledge but withdrew the nomination before it was even seconded because under the proposed constitution the term of the presidency changes from the calendar year to the academic year, meaning the new president will under the new constitution serve until next June 30, not merely until December 31, and being in the final year of her DPhil she wasn't prepared to sign up for that. In short: I was running unopposed. Ironically, before this past fall when one of my flatmates was running for Treasurer of CRC, I hadn't so much as voted in a student election since probably about 1990.)
Trouble is, it came to people's attention that (a) we didn't actually have a constitution or any by-laws or anything specifying how the place was to be run (in terms of social, welfare, etc. etc. stuff that Common Room Committee does), and (b) it is in fact illegal under the terms of our university charter not to have a separate autonomous student organization with its own funds. So, this winter, a working committee was convened to draft a constitution and by-laws, which they did, and the documents were approved first by the Common Room Committee, then by the Executive Board (a subset of Governing Body), and then by Governing Body itself -- and then, having been approved by these three groups of people, forwarded to all members of common room for their approval or rejection.
Which is where the fun begins.
There was some nonsense about an assertion that the students couldn't vote on the proposed constitution and bylaws without seeing the breakdown of the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, but that was just stupid (a stupid point raised by someone who had been on the working committee and has kept insisting that nobody has ever listened to him, when in fact it's just a matter of people considering his suggestions, discussing them, and deciding to do something else). There was some other nonsense, too, but the real hoo-ha broke out over the question of who was going to get a vote on the new Student Representative Committee (which is the same as the current Common Room Committee, but without the three grown-ups). This is a committee of fifteen people, four of whom -- environmental rep, LGB rep, arts rep, and careers rep -- were made non-voting elected positions in the proposed by-laws by virtue of the fact that their remits have no contact with the budget. Of course their concerns will be heard, but in the interest of streamlining the process and making it easier to achieve quorum, some positions had to be de-voted, and the ones with no budgetary attachments were the ones that got it.
Well, hell. Words like "disenfranchisement" and "discrimination" were thrown around like tennis balls. This past Monday was an open meeting attended by self; Queen P; C the past president; President N, the current actual (non-student) president; Son of a Preacher Man (who's on CRC); and S&M, the most annoying couple ever, who were the ones tossing around the D words mentioned above, as well as claiming to speak for a number of people they wouldn't name and who had chosen not to come to the meeting. Fie on hearsay, is what the rest of us pretty much said to that, but the upshot of it all was that if we wouldn't amend the by-laws before the voting this Wednesday and Thursday -- and we couldn't amend the by-laws before the vote, because those by-laws were what had been approved by CRC, Exec, and Governing Body -- then they'd be compelled not only to vote against it but to run themselves a No campaign.
That meeting took three and a half hours, by the way.
Fine, we said, and off everybody went, and even more snarling happened Wednesday over two different mailing lists before President N recommended everyone grow the hell up (I am pleased to report that not only did I do none of the snarling, but I didn't do any non-snarling; I didn't participate in the e-mail exchanges at all, and am in fact not a member of one of the lists in question); the voting ended last night at midnight, and, to conclude, the victory did not fall on us: I was elected 34-17 (over RON, or Re-Open Nominations, which is pretty amusing since nobody else wanted the job and also I don't think I even know 51 people in college), and the constitution and by-laws were defeated 50-39. (Senior Members voted on the documents but not on me.)
So. First order of business: amend the fucking by-laws (but not, I stress, precisely as S&M want them, because there was a reason that solution was rejected in the first place; personally, I like the concept of a split quorum, where say all 15 people can vote, so 8 must be present for quorum, three or four of whom must be from a subset of six people: president, vice president, treasurer, secretary, welfare officers (of whom there are two, one male and one female)) and push them through three layers of approval again and get the damn things voted on again and adopted before the fiscal year begins. On July 1.
In the meantime, you know, there's actually nobody who's guaranteed a vote on the committee. President N could listen to everyone's opinions (or not) and then decide all on his own to go a whole different direction. In fact there's no mechanism for anything to happen or not to happen, or to be changed, or anything. S&M's interests (and those of everyone else who voted the thing down) would have been much better served by approving the constitution and, once it's adopted, making a motion to amend it.
Idiots. Constituents.
:-)
the good news: i have been elected student president of common room for St Cross College, with effect from july 1.
the not-so-good news: our constitution and by-laws were rejected by the voters.
that's the short version. the long version is this:
Like all colleges, we have more than one sort of member; in our case, we don't have undergraduates, but we do obviously have students, or Junior Members, and we have fellows, or Senior Members. But we, in our aggressive informality, just have one common room -- so we just have one Common Room Committee, made up mainly of students elected by other students but also including the Bursar and Assistant Bursar (in a US-private-school model, think of the Master as the headmaster, the Bursar as the director of the school, and the Assistant Bursar as her deputy) and a president nominated from among the fellows by the Governing Body (which I believe is just a collection of all current fellows, but I could be wrong). That effectively makes the student president the vice president of CRC, so okay, whatever.
(Absolutely relevant side note: Queen P, our student president, found out at the end of May that he had won a very cushy scholarship at another college, so he promptly submitted his resignation effective June 30. After a bit of concern that one or both of two extremely ill-suited people would be nominated for the gig, I agreed to accept a nomination so people would have a non-evil option; and then it turned out that neither of those people was nominated, and another qualified person had been nominated without her knowledge but withdrew the nomination before it was even seconded because under the proposed constitution the term of the presidency changes from the calendar year to the academic year, meaning the new president will under the new constitution serve until next June 30, not merely until December 31, and being in the final year of her DPhil she wasn't prepared to sign up for that. In short: I was running unopposed. Ironically, before this past fall when one of my flatmates was running for Treasurer of CRC, I hadn't so much as voted in a student election since probably about 1990.)
Trouble is, it came to people's attention that (a) we didn't actually have a constitution or any by-laws or anything specifying how the place was to be run (in terms of social, welfare, etc. etc. stuff that Common Room Committee does), and (b) it is in fact illegal under the terms of our university charter not to have a separate autonomous student organization with its own funds. So, this winter, a working committee was convened to draft a constitution and by-laws, which they did, and the documents were approved first by the Common Room Committee, then by the Executive Board (a subset of Governing Body), and then by Governing Body itself -- and then, having been approved by these three groups of people, forwarded to all members of common room for their approval or rejection.
Which is where the fun begins.
There was some nonsense about an assertion that the students couldn't vote on the proposed constitution and bylaws without seeing the breakdown of the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, but that was just stupid (a stupid point raised by someone who had been on the working committee and has kept insisting that nobody has ever listened to him, when in fact it's just a matter of people considering his suggestions, discussing them, and deciding to do something else). There was some other nonsense, too, but the real hoo-ha broke out over the question of who was going to get a vote on the new Student Representative Committee (which is the same as the current Common Room Committee, but without the three grown-ups). This is a committee of fifteen people, four of whom -- environmental rep, LGB rep, arts rep, and careers rep -- were made non-voting elected positions in the proposed by-laws by virtue of the fact that their remits have no contact with the budget. Of course their concerns will be heard, but in the interest of streamlining the process and making it easier to achieve quorum, some positions had to be de-voted, and the ones with no budgetary attachments were the ones that got it.
Well, hell. Words like "disenfranchisement" and "discrimination" were thrown around like tennis balls. This past Monday was an open meeting attended by self; Queen P; C the past president; President N, the current actual (non-student) president; Son of a Preacher Man (who's on CRC); and S&M, the most annoying couple ever, who were the ones tossing around the D words mentioned above, as well as claiming to speak for a number of people they wouldn't name and who had chosen not to come to the meeting. Fie on hearsay, is what the rest of us pretty much said to that, but the upshot of it all was that if we wouldn't amend the by-laws before the voting this Wednesday and Thursday -- and we couldn't amend the by-laws before the vote, because those by-laws were what had been approved by CRC, Exec, and Governing Body -- then they'd be compelled not only to vote against it but to run themselves a No campaign.
That meeting took three and a half hours, by the way.
Fine, we said, and off everybody went, and even more snarling happened Wednesday over two different mailing lists before President N recommended everyone grow the hell up (I am pleased to report that not only did I do none of the snarling, but I didn't do any non-snarling; I didn't participate in the e-mail exchanges at all, and am in fact not a member of one of the lists in question); the voting ended last night at midnight, and, to conclude, the victory did not fall on us: I was elected 34-17 (over RON, or Re-Open Nominations, which is pretty amusing since nobody else wanted the job and also I don't think I even know 51 people in college), and the constitution and by-laws were defeated 50-39. (Senior Members voted on the documents but not on me.)
So. First order of business: amend the fucking by-laws (but not, I stress, precisely as S&M want them, because there was a reason that solution was rejected in the first place; personally, I like the concept of a split quorum, where say all 15 people can vote, so 8 must be present for quorum, three or four of whom must be from a subset of six people: president, vice president, treasurer, secretary, welfare officers (of whom there are two, one male and one female)) and push them through three layers of approval again and get the damn things voted on again and adopted before the fiscal year begins. On July 1.
In the meantime, you know, there's actually nobody who's guaranteed a vote on the committee. President N could listen to everyone's opinions (or not) and then decide all on his own to go a whole different direction. In fact there's no mechanism for anything to happen or not to happen, or to be changed, or anything. S&M's interests (and those of everyone else who voted the thing down) would have been much better served by approving the constitution and, once it's adopted, making a motion to amend it.
:-)
