In the month since their election, incoming student body president Casey Dennis ’15 and vice president Frank Cunningham ’16 have formulated their budget and restructured Student Assembly.
Dennis and Cunningham said structural changes include increasing the cabinet to nine members from five, decreasing the number of committees, including class council members in the general assembly and adding faculty to the academic affairs committee.
As a sophomore, Cunningham will remain on campus this summer and will lead the Student Assembly. New members will be appointed to fill the cabinet over the summer, but there will not be an election for a new student body president, Cunningham said. In the past, an interim president has been elected for the summer term, though current student body president Adrian Ferrari ’14 led the Assembly on campus last summer.
“This was something we stressed during campaign week,” Dennis said. “We didn’t want another transitional phase.”
The nine-member cabinet will include two rotating positions, for which students can apply each term, Dennis said.
Cunningham said they made this change to bring in a diversity of opinions and increase student involvement with the Assembly.
After serving on the cabinet, rotating members will be encouraged to join Assembly committees, Dennis said.
The four committees, he said, will encompass public affairs, diversity and community, student affairs and academic affairs.
“With so many committees to oversee, I think it’s been difficult for Student Assembly to keep the ball rolling,” Dennis said. “We want Student Assembly to be focused.”
Six students and four faculty members will sit on the academic affairs committee, Cunningham said.
Having class council members sit on the Assembly as general members in addition to their class council positions will increase communication and collaboration between the two groups, Dennis said.
2015 Class Council president Chase Mertz ’15 said he thinks incorporating class council members into the Assembly will centralize both groups’ work.
2016 Class Council President Daniel Reitsch ’16 also approved of the change, speaking to the power of combined resources to achieve common goals.
In a campus-wide email sent earlier this month, Dennis and Cunningham released the budget proposal they submitted to the Undergraduate Finance Committee. The decision to release the revised budget aligned with their promise to increase transparency, Dennis said.
The Assembly asked for $70,500, which Dennis and Cunningham noted in an email was the lowest request in five years. The Assembly sought to use this money to fund programs and initiatives like a mental health week, a new admissions video and a physical education scholarship fund. The undergraduate finance committee gave the Assembly $40,000.
Earlier this term, Dennis and Cunningham ran together in the Assembly election under the platform “Take Back Dartmouth.”
When he was elected, Dennis said his priorities as student body president would include increasing student engagement and Assembly transparency, partially through weekly office hours and a termly “state of the student body” video. Dennis also said he hoped to mandate the Dartmouth Bystander Initiative training during orientation.
During summer term, the Assembly will meet with administrators, alumni groups and the Board of Trustees so they can “hit the ground running” in the fall, Dennis said.
The Assembly’s first event was a barbecue on Collis patio during Green Key, which Dennis deemed a success due to a high turnout.
During the summer, the Assembly plans to organize a drive-in movie night at the Fairlee Drive-In for the entire sophomore class. In their initial budget request they asked for $5,000 to allocate to the event.
“The thing that keeps driving Casey and I is the thought of one day uniting this campus and really becoming the voice of the student body,” Cunningham said.
Ferrari and former chief of staff Gustavo Ruiz Llopiz ’14 declined to comment, citing busy schedules. The rest of the leadership board and former vice president Michael Zhu ’14 did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
