The Student Assembly passed six amendments to its constitution last night in an effort to bring the rules governing the group up to date with current practices.
The amendments passed almost unanimously, with the only opposition coming from long-time Assembly members who defended the rationale behind the original constitution.
The proposed amendments proved surprisingly contentious, given that the actual changes made were minor and Student Body Vice President Julia Hildreth '05 had warned that the amendment process would be "dry." But in questioning the amendments' language and stressing the importance of semantics, Mike Perry '03 and Erica Berman '03 seemed to be making more of a symbolic gesture than expressing any radically different policy views.
The six "housekeeping amendments" drafted by the Assembly's Membership and Internal Affairs Committee do not represent any major policy changes, but are meant to reflect practices the Assembly has been pursuing informally since at least the beginning of this term, Hildreth explained to the Assembly.
"MIAC feels that it's really important for the constitution to reflect what we really do in Assembly for it to be respected. Either we should follow it or amend it," Hildreth said.
Nevertheless, some Assembly members seemed worried that changing the constitution would signal a permanent deviation from previous policy. Worried about undermining the continuity in Assembly leadership, Perry and Berman objected to an amendment changing the residence requirements for committee chairs.
Perry drew on his experience as a fourth-year Assembly member to attempt to explain why committee chairs were previously required to be in residence during Winter term.
"The reason this was put in the constitution was in order to have continuity from term to term," Perry explained. "The people who created this were mindful of that -- it wasn't just a frivolous amendment. This is a change to the philosophy of the Assembly."
But the amendment's supporters argued that it is unrealistic to expect committee chairs to be in residence for all three terms.
"This is an issue of pragmatism versus idealism," Brett Martin '04 said. "If you want to have a constitution that actually addresses the problems that we have, then we should say that we'll take the person for two terms instead of three."
Other members worried that having stringent residence requirements would result in a dearth of qualified applicants.
"That pretty much precludes a huge percentage of the campus from upper-level leadership positions in SA," said Andy Edwards '04, the chair of the administration and faculty relations committee, noting that most sophomores and juniors are studying abroad or off campus for at least one term.
For his part, Perry said that several proponents of the amendment were misunderstanding the original rules of the constitution, which allows committee chairs to be off campus during Spring term.
An amendment that proposed moving one section of the constitution to a different location provoked similar debate and criticism, despite sponsor Martin's insistence that it would be more logical to include the student services board in a description of other committees.
But Perry disagreed, noting that the board, unlike committees, does not make policy decisions.
"I think it is actually in a good spot right now," he said. "Generally on Assembly in the past there's been a distinction between services and policy. It's important to distinguish between the two."
The Assembly also voted to eliminate a twice-termly evaluation of individual Assembly members in favor of evaluating the work of each committee once a term.
The decision was made in the interest of allowing MIAC to focus on other projects, Hildreth said.
But Berman, challenging Hildreth's interpretation of the original constitution, suggested that the change was based on a mistaken understanding of how evaluation were intended to function in the first place.
"It's hard to interpret what things actually mean without having the people here who wrote the original amendments," Berman said.
Despite expressing a dissenting opinion for most of the proposed amendments, Berman stressed that she does not categorically object to changing the constitution.
A member of the MIAC, she sponsored an amendment to allow the student body president to activate or deactivate certain appointed positions according to his or her needs.
Nevertheless, reacting to the near-unanimity among the Assembly, she stressed the need for debate.
"One thing that would be really unfortunate on SA would be for arguments to pass without any discussion," she said. "I wasn't trying to just play devil's advocate, but I do think it's important to have all the different diverse opinions represented."
