Student Council passed a resolution last night recommending changes to the Council constitution aimed at supplementing the representatives' responsibilities and clarifying procedures.
According to the resolution, these amendments will require all representatives to serve on the Appropriations Committee. They will also allow representatives to elect the executive vice president, make the Executive Board a nonvoting entity and allow the first-year president and transfer student liaison to have full voice and vote powers throughout the year.
During debate over the resolution, Medical School Rep. Gregory Weaver voiced concern over the proposal to elect the executive vice president from the representative body. Weaver said if a representative is elected EVP and therefore no longer holds a vote, as the proposal makes the Executive Board a nonvoting body, that representative then risks compromising the values that his constituents elected him to represent.
"If people vote for me as a representative, and then I want to be EVP, I am taking a different position and am no longer representing my constituents," said Weaver. "If you are elected as a representative, then you should keep all the powers that go with being a representative, keeping with the expectations of your constituents."
Student Council President Darius Nabors supported the resolution, and said the EVP would vote in the instance of a tie in votes among representatives and that it was important that he appeared unbiased. He also said a representative elected to the office of EVP could continue to represent his constituents in other ways.
"The EVP can still uphold the concerns of constituents," Nabors said.
The EVP's tasks such as running the meetings, setting attendance policies and controlling committees are ways in which the EVP can influence the conversations in Council, Nabors said.
Tom Bryan, representative of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, said the listing of specific standing committees in the amendments did not leave "enough wiggle room" for future councils to make changes without going through the amendment process.
The resolution passed in a 15-3 vote.
Nabors said the amendments would be a "positive change for the Council and for the University."
As stated in the current constitution, all amendments must be approved by two-thirds of voters in the spring Student Council elections before they can be adopted.
Additional resolutions adopted by Student Council last night included an endorsement of the curriculum internationalization survey organized by the Committee on Diversity Initiatives. According to a press release by Diversity Initiatives Committee Chair Ryan McElveen, the survey will analyze internationalization, regional studies, language instruction and international and transnational programs in terms of how they relate to the future of the University.
"We really tried to work long and hard on a University-wide scale in order to address all students' points of view," McElveen said. "We want to make the University more appealing on an international scale."
The Council also approved a resolution to appoint second-year Engineering student Jack Wilson as the new Student Council parliamentarian.
"I felt like it would be an easy and non-time consuming way to become involved," Wilson said.
Wilson replaces third-year College student A.J. Frey, who, according to the resolution, could no longer "balance the time commitments" to remain as parliamentarian.
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