This entry refers to the Senate meeting on September 29^th:

Once the year starts going, senate meetings start establishing a routine. In officer reports, Nick always brings up some awesome new initiative he has going on. This week he described a new freshman dorm initiative that will install monitors in freshman dorms monitoring the amount of energy freshmen use, you know, watching Gossip Girl and playing World of Warcraft. Raj always thanks people for going to their respective meetings. Peter brings up some news about money. In case we don’t get the point, at some point he also wants to bring in Peter Shea to talk about money and how the current economic situation will affect Amherst. Mike approves some more clubs. This week the JC approved the Argentinean Tango Club and the Investment Club.

In committee reports, the Disciplinary Committee discussed what constitutes rape and sexual abuse. Haley explained the current situation of the Olio – they need 5 more section editors. Remember three years ago when instead of seeing faces of cheery Amherst students in the Olio, you saw big gray rectangular placeholders? I guess three years ago, we didn’t find those 5 section editors; let’s hope we’re luckier this year. Mason, our IT superhero, single handedly wrote the program for the elections after the guy hired to do so failed.

Next the Dining Services Committee members, Katie, Jared, and David solicited opinions on how to spice up (hehe) Val. They started out by tossing in some of their delicious ideas – the stirfry station turning into an omelet station in the morning, blenders for a smoothie stations, more ice cream toppings like crushed Oreo’s, Reese’s Pieces, etc., nutrition information online, better salad options like nuts or cranberries, and new meal plans. In the open discussion, we discussed the fantastic idea of a 24 Hour Val station where cereal or something else easy could be accessible 24/7. And of course, no discussion of Val could be had without the fruitless (hehe) discussion of our limited meal plan options. Senators (waffle) ironed out issues like how difficult it is to get off the meal plan and encouraged the committee to look at different number of meals a week or creating an off-campus meal plan. Chris makes the reasonable comparison of the balsalmic vinegar to battery acid.

Chase’s Point of General Privilege this week: Val’s meat right now is the lowest grade of edible meat. He recommends that we upgrade.

Any other ideas about how to improve Val?

BC recs were pretty tame this week. The biggest controversy was Habitat for Humanity’s request for fees for a Pioneer Valley Walk. This is that type of thing where you’re supposed to get people to sponsor you for every mile or whatever. People tried to show how this is analogous to conference fees since they get networking opportunities. While that may be true, I hope the senate realizes that there are appreciable differences which should encourage them to continue to fund conference fees while never funding these type of fundraiser requests. At conferences, one receives specific training and workshops by paid professionals unlike this walk. Moreover, the whole point of this type of walk is to encourage these students to do their own fundraising and have people sponsoring them thereby raising awareness and starting serious discussions on poverty and gentrification (maybe). They even admitted as much by explaining that they wouldn’t ask for this money next year and that it was only a one time thing in order to guarantee participants.

Finally we moved on to something more controversial than the BC recs. We discussed a senate project to dorm storm for voter registration. Chris wanted money for food for student volunteers to encourage students to go around to the hostile upperclassmen dorms. What this debate came down to was Senate privilege. If MassPIRG had come to us asking for money for their freshman dorm storming event, we would have flatly said no on the grounds that we only provide food for the first meeting for any club. Chase made the dubious claim that because we were elected by the students, we have the authority to make value judgments about what is important to fund. This claim, while an interesting one to consider, opposes the general senate position that we try to allocate funds in a consistently fair way without judging what is important to the student body as a whole. Mason made a similarly dubious claim that because a presidential election only happens once in our Amherst career and its great importance, we should privilege this event. I think the line is finer than he makes out. There are quite a few events that only happen once in our Amherst career and are pretty important – the turkey drop, for example, or that one time you go for Val bulgogi. Okay these are terrible examples, but the point is I don’t think you can tell students what they should consider important above all other things (in this case politics over all other interests like tango or LBGTQ issues) and by giving this particular issue funding when we wouldn’t otherwise does exactly that. For once, the side of fiscal conservativism scored a ringing success as the senate denied the funding.