On Oct. 4, the Dartmouth Student Government met for its second weekly meeting of the fall term. The Senate hosted dean of undergraduate student affairs John McKnight and dean of Arts and Sciences Nina Pavcnik, who were seeking student input ahead of the College’s upcoming public “listening session” on artificial intelligence. The event, which will be held today at 12:30 p.m., will be a roundtable discussion with College President Sian Leah Beilock and other faculty and administrators scheduled.
Prior to student discussion, McKnight said that he wanted to hear directly from students about their experiences with AI on campus.
“My sense is that students at large are quite confused about the moment we’re living through,” McKnight said. “We really relish the opportunity to hear from you all about what you’re hearing on the ground.”
Pavcnik said she believes the College will need different AI guidelines across departments.
“Given the breadth of the liberal arts education that you are receiving at Dartmouth, anywhere from studio art to physics, I think we will need different approaches in different disciplines,” Pavcnik said. “That’s why having a very general perspective on this is going to be really important.”
General senator and dining, basic needs and accessibility committee chair Issa Allison ’29 said he believes the College is missing consistent guidelines for administrators, faculty and students.
“We need to have something ironed out with both admin, faculty and students to follow,” Allison said. “In cases when we have our provost using it, all students and all faculty and all admin should be held to those standards.”
General senator and housing, technology and transportation committee chair Trace Ribble ’29 contrasted Provost Santiago Schnell’s alleged AI use with students he said have told him they face “false AI accusations” and must “defend their own academic record.”
“I’m seeing a lot of student annoyance,” Ribble said. “So then to see what would seem to be legitimate AI accusations against the provost, there’s a lot of frustration.”
Student body president Ikenna Nwafor ’27 said the campus community “should think about how Dartmouth uses AI as an institution.”
“We partnered with AWS [Amazon Web Services], with Anthropic too,” Nwafor said. “The conversation shouldn’t just be exclusive to ‘how can I use AI and how can Dartmouth help?’ We should also talk about how Dartmouth is using AI.”
Bus voucher program
At the Oct. 4 meeting, Allison also presented a proposal for DSG to contribute up to $15,000 of its annual budget to supporting the Office of Financial Aid’s Dartmouth Coach voucher program, which provides students who receive financial aid with vouchers for Dartmouth Coach trips during term interims.
Last winter, DSG approved $10,000 to fund the bus voucher program for the winter-to-spring and spring-to-summer interims. The funding raised the annual family income eligibility threshold for students from $75,000 to $85,000. This year’s proposed $15,000 in funding would allow the financial aid office to also offer vouchers for Dartmouth Coach tickets before and after the fall-to-winter interim, in addition to the winter-to-spring and spring-to-summer interims, while keeping the raised threshold in place.
Nwafor and student body vice president Maggie de la Fuente ’27 both raised concerns about the program’s cost relative to DSG’s operating budget of $82,000.
“I worry about committing this percentage of our budget to this program every year if they [the financial aid office] are not planning to up the income threshold,” de la Fuente said.
“I generally don’t believe DSG’s job is literally to just throw money at things,” Nwafor said.
Chief of staff Oscar Rempe-Hiam ’29 said at the Oct. 4 meeting that he has heard of students “abusing” the voucher system, including by reselling vouchers.
“If we’re going to fund it now, I want to set kind of an ultimatum that we won’t fund this again,” Rempe-Hiam said. “It cuts a lot of money from us, every single year, that we could be spending on other things. It’s about time this got institutionalized and stopped eating into our budget.”
The Dartmouth was not able to independently verify Rempe-Hiam’s claims.
In response to the senate’s concern about unused or misused vouchers, Allison said financial aid director G. Dino Koff is able to work with Dartmouth Coach, which is not owned or operated by the College, to determine which vouchers aren’t used within a certain time frame and potentially refund the cost of those vouchers to DSG.
Koff did not respond to requests for comment.
South House senator and health, wellness and safety committee chair Isla Walker ’29 asked Allison for more data on how many students would receive vouchers from the funding increase. She warned against DSG “paying for what financial aid won’t cover.”
“At the end of the day, this is something that we should be pushing for financial aid to cover, not us covering their asses with it,” Walker said.
The Senate agreed to revisit the proposal at a future meeting.
Committee updates
South House senator and academic affairs and faculty relations committee chair Jason Zhu ’28 said he is continuing to look for College partners for DSG’s book bank program, which fulfilled orders for 191 students this term at a cost of $7,000.
Walker said DSG’s Health, Wellness, and Safety committee is working with Dartmouth Athletics executive associate director for business strategy and operations J.B. Weber to extend the Lewinstein Athletic Center’s hours on Thursdays until midnight, from 10 p.m. The launch, which was initially planned for last week, has been delayed due to a student worker shortage.
Dartmouth Athletics is “currently recruiting staff to cover the additional hours,” Weber wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth.
The Senate voted unanimously to co-sponsor the Dartmouth Civics voter registration drive, which will take place on Oct. 13 from 12 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. in the Hopkins Center for the Arts. DSG is not providing financial support and will only help to promote the event.
DSG Senate meetings occur weekly on Sundays at 4 p.m. in Collis 101 and are open to all students.
Oscar Rempe-Hiam ’29 is an opinion columnist for The Dartmouth. He was not involved in writing or editing this article.
