Student Council met in the Law School Tuesday to hear from a representative from the Student Bar Association, as well as members of University Information Technology Services.
Morgan Lingar, incoming SBA president and Law School representative, gave Council an overview of the organization’s current concerns and plans for the upcoming year.
“I really would like to focus on student self governance in terms of how it applies to a lot of ways over the past year we’ve seen administrators working unilaterally without consulting law students,” Lingar said.
Lingar said there have been issues with administrative control of the Keg, a weekly social event at the Law School.
“When we had to get reapproved for this semester,” Lingar said. “We were told that we were going to have to move it to Fridays with the knowledge that next year there would be no weekly events holding alcohol at all at the Law School.”
Lingar said Law School students were frustrated with the reasons for cancelling these events, cited as safety concerns about sexual assault.
“A lot of people, myself included, are very concerned that that is our way of addressing sexual assault,” Lingar said. “We’re very frustrated our voices aren’t heard.”
Lingar said when she asked more specifically about reported sexual assaults or any research which might show a higher number of reports on Thursdays due to the association with Law School events, she was told there have been reported assaults, but administrators have not kept specific data or records.
“What we’ve been hearing from the administrators that it is within the philosophy for the administration to make changes without consulting students,” Lingar said. “For a school that values self-governance, that attitude to me is very disturbing.”
Lingar said SBA is continuing to work on the issue, but she expects it to be ongoing for quite some time.
Law School Representative Andrew Lanius agreed with Lingar and said there has been a lot of encroachment on student rights by both named and unnamed administrators.
“We’ve keep getting the runaround when we try and figure out what is going on here,” Lanius said. “Even last semester, they pulled our student newspaper one week because they thought one of the columns was offensive.”
Lingar said she would ultimately like to increase SBA involvement with other University student leadership organizations to talk about student self governance.
In the latter of the meeting ITS spoke to Council about the upcoming renovations to the University's wireless technology system.
Keith Moores, director of network, telephone and video services for ITS, said ITS is in the middle of a $4 million project to upgrade all wireless access points on Grounds. By replacing and redesigning WiFi on Grounds — 80 percent of which is about 10 years old — Moores said ITS is jumping several generations ahead in wireless technology.
“The new system is faster, smarter [and] it is providing the ability to use all the devices people are connecting to wireless,” Moores said.
Moores said ITS is doubling the number of wireless access points in around 200 buildings on Grounds. One of the key concepts in the project, he said, is the media redesign, in which ITS will evaluate different spaces and design wireless coverage best suited for each space.
Moore said a schedule and all the information related to the wireless upgrade project is available on the ITS website.
“We want people to be aware,” Moores said. “The concept here is that we list everything we do publicly.”
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