The Student Assembly narrowly passed a statement recommending that the Board of Trustees add a young alumnus to its membership last night.
To pass, the statement required the affirmation of two-thirds of the present voting members. Members of the Assembly's Executive Committee remained after the meeting adjourned to discuss the close vote. After referencing the Assembly constitution to ascertain how abstentions should be counted, the highly contested statement was passed by a margin of only one vote.
The statement, drafted and sponsored by Student Body President Janos Marton '04, will be presented to the Board of Trustees in about a week.
The current trustees "can be out of touch with the sentiment on campus," said Marton. He also said that the Board of Trustees is composed predominantly of alumni who graduated 20 years ago or more. The youngest member of the Board of Trustees graduated in 1984.
The resolution calls for an application process for graduating seniors every three years. From the applicant pool, the Assembly's Membership and Internal Affairs Committee will select 10 applicants from which the student body will choose three.
The Board of Trustees will make their final selection from that group. The young alumnus trustee will serve for three years after his or her graduation, at which point the process will be repeated.
Several Assembly members were concerned that the selection process was unfair because not every graduated class would have the chance to run for the Trustee position.
Others were concerned that the representative should be directly elected by the student body and not by the MIAC. Marton disagreed, saying that the Trustees would not accept a directly elected member of the student body because they feared it would be a "popularity contest" and that the elected member would not fit the specific prerequisites for being a Trustee, such as leadership and financial management experience.
Marton also said that two similar propositions had been rejected by the Board of Trustees in the past 10 years because the Board had feared that they would not have any choice in the alumnus selected and that the alumnus would be held too accountable to the student body. All other Board Members are not held accountable to any one specific group of alumni.
"Our job is first to represent the students, not to be pragmatic towards the trustees," said Assembly member Shardul Oza '06.
Some members expressed skepticism that the addition of one young alumnus member would result in any real change in the decisions made by the Board of Trustees, but Amit Anand '03 said "if something like the SLI happens again -- you may wish we had a young alumnus on the Board."
Both Anand and Marton also said that the Trustees may not follow the statement exactly but that they would nonetheless accept it as a general recommendation.
A few members hoped that the logistics of the resolution could be changed to allow not only graduating seniors but also recent graduates to apply for the position.
The Assembly briefly discussed several other topics including the College's recently-revamped alcohol policy, a possible new committee to investigate campus privacy and a few ideas for solving staffing and funding problems at the Big Green Bean and Lone Pine Tavern.
