The Student Assembly elected James Gallo '99 as its new vice president at the first meeting of Spring term last night, but tabled a host of proposed constitutional amendments.
Gallo replaces Janelle Ruley '00, who was elected for a two-week tenure at the end of last term after Nahoko Kawakyu '99 resigned. Ruley is in Washington, D.C., this term.
Kawakyu won the vice presidency in a write-in campaign last Spring term -- the first candidate to ever do so. Announcing her resignation, she said Assembly commitments forced her to neglect personal needs.
Gallo said he is excited about being elected and looks forward to continuing the work of Kawakyu and Ruley, but does not have any specific agendas in mind for the Assembly this term.
"Since I was just elected, I don't have any immediate plans, " Gallo said.
In addition, the Assembly named Dean Krishna '01 its new secretary and picked Millie Cho '99 and Domingo Martinez '00 to chair the ad hoc committee on diversity. Greg Chittim '01 and Sena Ku '01 were elected to head the Assembly's Visions committee.
Although the Assembly had planned to elect two new members to the powerful Membership and Internal Affairs Committee, the elections were postponed.
The two-and-a-half hour meeting also saw the Assembly approve $1,700 in promotional funding for the Dartmouth Interactive Directory, an on-line directory webpage, which says it allows members of Dartmouth College to search the community by name, year, major, campus address, organization, affiliation and interest, among other topics.
Of 10 constitutional amendment proposals on the Assembly's agenda, only two were voted on in their entirety. The meeting was adjourned before all amendments were debated, and four were tabled because of member concerns at the length of the meeting.
Most were procedural changes:
--The Assembly voted to replace the community service committee with a single community service coordinator.
--The president can now select a different student to serve as summer chair if he or she does not want to or is not on campus.
--A tabled constitutional change would have created a new executive officer, the chief of staff to the president. The proposal surfaced because of Kawakyu's resignation last term and publicity about the amount of time required to serve in the capacities of president and vice president. Members voted to table the amendment after one element of it sparked debate. Case Dorkey '99 said he was concerned about confidentiality since non-members could be selected by the president to fill this position and still sit in closed executive committee sessions.
--Another proposal, voted on in part, allowed four Dartmouth representatives to attend and vote at this weekend's Ivy Council Meeting. The Council consists of students from the Ivy League colleges, but the group's new constitution requires each institution to draft specific guidelines for the selection of representatives.
There was debate between Assembly members over whether the rule change would affect this weekend's meeting.
Many wanted to table the proposal, saying that the change takes effect after this conference and would not prevent student representatives from the College from voting. But Dave Gacioch '00 said he believed that the rule change would take effect in time for this weekend's meeting.
Gallo proposed simply drafting by-law wording allowing the specific four representatives to attend this weekend, but after much discussion the Assembly voted to approve the original proposal which requires representatives to be selected by the president of Student Assembly.
