This year, Student Assembly has focused on encouraging student participation in the Dartmouth Bystander Initiative and developing institutional memory, said student body president Adrian Ferrari ’14 and vice president Michael Zhu ’14. Some students were not aware of the organization’s work, but Ferrari said he hopes that “the invisible legacy” of this year’s Assembly will lead to increased efficiency in future years.
“The next president can hit the ground running,” Ferrari said. “That way, they can start immediately on their projects and their initiatives and won’t have to rebuild everything like we did.”
Student Assembly has pushed the administration to expand participation in DBI training, Ferrari said. One proposal under discussion involves offering physical education credit for participants in DBI leadership training.
“It just seems so fundamental to me,” Ferrari said. “How can we be a community if people we know are being assaulted? If student groups keep pushing, we can make substantial progress before the year ends, but we can’t lose momentum.”
Increased participation in DBI, Ferrari said, could protect students in threatening situations.
The Assembly is currently working with administrators and organizations including the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault, the Interfraternity Council and Mentors Against Violence to train more students.
Sexual Abuse Awareness Program coordinators and Dean of the College Charlotte Johnson, among others, implemented DBI in Nov. 2012 to reduce sexual assault by teaching students how to recognize and intervene in high-risk situations. Clinical psychologist Jennifer Messina ’93 developed the program, returning to campus in 2011 after spending years helping people recover from sexual violence.
“The executive board believes that sexual assault and prevention is a big task that we as a student body should embrace,” Zhu said. “I think the program really works well, but we don’t have a critical mass of trained students.”
Creating institutional memory for future Assemblies, Ferrari said, has been the greatest challenge. Each cabinet member and committee chair keeps logs of his or her job requirements to pass on to successors.
The Assembly has also collaborated with Dartmouth Roots on Improve Dartmouth, a new website that allows users to suggest and vote on ideas for improving the College.
The tool will enable next year’s Assembly will keep track of issues that are important to students, Ferrari said.
The Assembly’s academic affairs committee has worked with the Dean of the Faculty Michael Mastanduno to create a questionnaire for public course reviews that will be available to all students, Ferrari said. The new system would improve upon its predecessor, CourseRank, and the current course review forms that students must complete before receiving grades.
“As long as I’ve been here, we’ve been in a mired state where students don’t go to any one website because all the reviews are really outdated,” Ferrari said.
Another Assembly initiative implemented new guidelines for a program that subsidizes meals between faculty and students. After local businesses reported that some students used vouchers without professors, the Assembly revised the take your professor to lunch program. Students must now prove confirmation of a scheduled meeting with a professor before collecting a voucher, preventing misuse of student activities fees, Ferrari said.
Several members of the Class of 2017 interviewed said they were unaware of the Assembly’s activities.
“I’ve just heard of Student Assembly,” Gretchen Skye Herrick ’17 said. “I don’t know what they do.”
Dana Wieland ’17 said she similarly did not know what the Assembly does, adding that maybe the organization had influenced her Dartmouth experience without her realizing.
“I don’t really know what they do,” Christopher Park ’17 said. “They never seem to advertise anything.”
Zhu said that students have not been aware of the Assembly’s efforts in the past, and that changing the organization’s reputation is a lengthy process. He noted, however, that he thought the first general assembly meeting this term was well attended.
“It’s hard to make a complete 180 turnaround,” Zhu said. “Making students aware of Student Assembly is going to be an ongoing project.”
Jordan Kunzika ’16 said the Assembly should interact more with students.
“They call it Student Assembly,” Kunzika said. “Why don’t they lead student-led seminars and publicize meetings on big issues so they can engage with students and hear students’ first-hand experiences?”
Ferrari said the Assembly is also trying send more timely and relevant emails. After Monday night’s gathering to condemn sexual assault, at which Ferrari spoke, the Assembly sent a campus-wide email that detailed ways in which students can get involved in the movement to end sexual violence.
“I’m proud that so many of you turned out to show your support,” the email read. “But we can’t pretend that sexual assault disappears because we came together and sang the alma mater.”
Priya Ramaiah contributed reporting.
