Last night the Student Assembly took an important step toward securing the release of the official list of candidates for a number of student leadership positions -- including Assembly president and vice president -- which has been held up by controversy over D-plans.
The Assembly passed a resolution whose sole purpose is to correct an inconsistency between the Election Planning and Advising Committee's requirements for students holding office and the Assembly constitution from which they were derived.
The mistake in the EPAC's requirements -- which were supposed to exactly match those mandated by the Assembly constitution -- was realized when the names of three of the six people running for either the position of Assembly president or vice president were struck from the ballots for the upcoming Spring term elections.
Unlike the Assembly constitution, the EPAC's rules stated that all students running for the position of Assembly president or vice president must be taking classes for the three terms during which they would hold office. The Assembly constitution only requires that the student be in Hanover at the time.
This is the first time that there has been any controversy over the slate, although the differences in regulations are not new.
The office of the Dean of the College has been responsible for approving students to run for office, and notified the three candidates of their ineligibility based on the EPAC's inaccurate set of office-holding requisites.
According to the resolution, "Let it be resolved that the SA, through its representatives to the EPAC, notify the chair of the EPAC of this clarification as soon as it is possible as to correct the situation."
The misunderstanding negatively affected the three people because they had registered for a leave term sometime during next year.
Also at the meeting, Jorge Miranda '01 gave a presentation on the recommendations of the Assembly's Committee on Academic Advising, which has been looking at ways to improve Dartmouth's academic advising system for the past two terms.
A vote on the suggested reforms will take place in the future, after the committee has conducted a vote of the faculty's reaction to the proposed changes.
The committee found that a three tiered approach would be the best solution, incorporating a voluntary system with monetary incentives and additional training on the part of the faculty, creating a peer advisor system and the institution of a pre-major advising center.
Key elements of the recommendations include students' ability to change faculty advisors by filling out a card and having it signed by their new one, the pairing of a senior with an underclassman in the same field and the creation of positions for four professional advisors.
The recommendations were submitted to the Committee on Instruction, which consequently made suggestions of their own.
These suggestions included the association of advising with UGA groups within the residential cluster system and the appointment of an advising coordinator to oversee the shift from first-year advising to pre-major advising, which would include freshmen and sophomores.
In the words of the resolution, "Any change in the advising system requires faculty approval, and the committee would like to secure faculty support for the proposal before it comes to a vote."
The Assembly also passed a resolution to buy and install a functional iMac computer in Dartmouth Hall, tentatively planned to be installed where the existing one is on the first floor.
A third resolution that would change the titles of "Student Assembly president" and "Student Assembly vice president" to "Student-Body president" and "Student-Body vice president" was not brought to a vote because the necessary three quarters of voting members was not attained at the meeting. The resolution will be brought to the floor again next week.
It was also reported by Assembly President Dean Krishna '01 at the meeting that 1,150 students had voted so far on the Assembly's response to the steering committee's recommendations.
